When comparing Jenkins vs Codeship, the Slant community recommends Codeship for most people. In the question“What are the best continuous integration tools?” Codeship is ranked 3rd while Jenkins is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose Codeship is:
Support for public and private GitHub and BitBucket repositories. It also has support for multi-user teams.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Highly customizable
Even though Jenkins is pretty functional and useful out of the box, there's a large plugin ecosystem from which the user can choose plugins to integrate into their Jenkins build. This is needed for when the user wants to extend any of the tool's features.
Pro Free and open source
Jenkins is a free and open source continuous integration tool, while its source code is hosted on GitHub.
Pro Safe to store key environment variables
Self-hosting provides a safe location to store key environment variables since it is the user who is in charge of the server and environment where Jenkins is hosted.
Pro A lot of resources and tutorials available
Jenkins has been in development since 2004 and is one of the most popular tools of its kind. This means that its technology is very mature and there is a lot of documentation and resources available for it.
Pro Multiple version control systems supported
Supports the most popular version control systems out of the box: SVN, Mercurial, and Git.
Pro Scalable
The distributed builds in Jenkins work effectively, thanks to the Master and Slave capabilities.
Pro Stable release line for users who want less changes
This is called the Jenkins Long-Term Support (LTS) version and helps to provide the most stable and assuring version of the Jenkins CI possible. Every 3 months, a version (which has been deemed the most reliable by the community) is chosen. After this, its branched, well-tested features are added (if they are missing), it is tested with the new features, bug fixes are then carried out if necessary, and from there it is released as the official Jenkins LTS version.
Pro User can source control their chain of automation
Starting with Jenkins 2.0, the pipeline capability, which has been available as a plugin before this version, has been built into Jenkins itself. This allows developers to describe their chain of automation in text form, which can be version controlled and put alongside the source tree.
Pro Quantity of available Plugins
For most operations we need not reinvent the wheel, there are plugins already existing.
Pro Cross-platform build support
Being a Java application it can be installed under any OS: Windows, Linux, and macOS. On the other hand, JNLP slaves also enriches the cross-platform build support for its agents.
Pro Easy to get up and running
A Jenkins install is very simple and the user can have the service up and running within minutes. To install Jenkins, the command java -jar jenkins.war
is all that is needed - nothing more.
Pro Supports most of the technological stacks for free by specific plugins
Including, Docker, Amazon EC2 and S3.
Pro Great community
Jenkins has a large and helpful community, which welcomes new users and provides a great number of tutorials.
Project Website, including links to Blog , Wiki, Docs. Community groups via Jenkins Users ML group.
Pro Self hosted
You stay in full control of your source code, build environment and deployment. No third party gets access to your source code or knows exactly how to build your software.
Pro Encryption of secrets
Thanks to JENKINS Credentials and Plugin.
Pro Multiple test environments for different runtime versions
They can be added easily under your Global Configuration.
Pro Awards and recognition
Including InfoWorld Bossie Award (Best of Open Source Software Award) in 2011, and Received Geek Choice Award in 2014.
Pro GitHub & Bitbucket integration
Support for public and private GitHub and BitBucket repositories. It also has support for multi-user teams.
Pro Keeps it simple. Doesn't allow too many "tricky" things which means builds are generally very stable once they are up and going.
Pro Headless browser support
Alongside latest Chrome and Firefox, Codeship supports the use of Selenium, PhantomJS, CasperJS as well as tools like Capybara.
Pro Build status GIF
There's a continuously updated GIF of the build status of the repository allowing you to determine whether build was successful or not.
Pro Support for multiple tools, languages and databases
Support for e-mail, HipChat, Slack, Campfire, Flowdock, Grove, Webhook, Github Status API.
Support for Ruby, Python, Node, Dart, PHP, Java, Scala, Groovy, Clojure, Go.
Support for: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Memcached, ElasticSearch, SQLite.
Pro Supports 7 cloud providers
Support for AWS, Digital Ocean, Rackspace, Google Compute, Joyent, Softlayer, Openstack.
Pro Docker support
Pro Simple deployments with a choice of 5 deployment tools
Support for Capistrano, Fabric, Chef, Puppet, Ansible and allows for writing your own scripts to deploy and manage your infrastructure.
Pro Supports 10 hosting providers
Support for Heroku, Engine Yard, Nodejitsu, dotCloud, App Engine, AppFog, Modulus, Openshift, Cloud Foundry, Fortrabbit and you can also run your own script to deploy anywhere.
Pro FTP, SFTP, SCP, RSYNC and SSH support
You can use FTP, SFTP, SCP, RSYNC and SSH for Continuous Deployment.
Pro Code Climate & Coveralls support
Automated code review for RoR and JavaScript and test coverage history and statistics with Code Climate and Coveralls.
Cons
Con Poor quality plug-ins that are difficult to combine
There have been several complaints by users regarding the quality of the plug-ins found in Jenkins' official plugin repo. A lot of plugins found in the default plugin directory are no longer actively maintained and as a result, they may be incompatible with later versions of Jenkins or other plugins.
Con High overhead
Unlike some of the simple and hosted alternatives, users need to host and setup Jenkins by themselves. This results in both a high initial setup time, as well as time sunk into maintenance over a project's duration.
Con Unstable and lack of plugin integration QA process
Jenkins without plugins is almost useless. All plugins are treated equal and published almost right away.
Because there is no process for testing Jenkins' integration, the overall Jenkins experience is not that great. Furthermore, Jenkins' core and plugins are released on a regular basis, all requiring instant restarts, meaning that updates appear more than once a day!
Con Cannot get pipelines right
They are on the 5th attempt to make pipelines working. Still lot to be desired and clunky. Thoughtworks took CruiseControl and just rewrote it from scratch to make GoCD. Go.CD has pipeline support as first class citizens.
Con Restarting of pipeline steps only available in commercial version
Reliable pipelines with step restarts are only available in the enterprise version. Last time I talked to them in 2018, I was quoted $20k/year for that.
Con Vulnerable
Vulnerable to cross site and DOS attacks, read article Top 10 Java Vulnerabilities And How To Fix Them.
Con Limited pipeline size
Pipeline-as-code is limited to a JVM method size limit.
Con Doesn't support git modules
If repo contain private submodule - build will fail, no way to add your private key.
Con Any time you ask support for help on Codeship basic (which isn't free anyway), they will just try to up sell you to Pro version.
Con No Global variables that can be shared amongst all projects.
Con Environment variables are exposed. Any keys or secrets can just be copied.
No option to mask them unless you reduce permissions for those users. Developers need to be able to modify a job but probably shouldn't be able to copy a production api key. Just needs one more level of permissions here.
Con Too many permissions on Bitbucket
When registering with Bitbucket Codeship it requests way to many permissions, even "Read and write to your team's projects and move repositories between them". Before giving all these permissions you have to be sure you can trust this service.