When comparing TeamCity vs Travis, the Slant community recommends TeamCity for most people. In the question“What are the best continuous integration tools?” TeamCity is ranked 1st while Travis is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose TeamCity is:
TeamCity has different installation packages for different operating systems. All the user needs to do is download the correct one and run it.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Easy installation
TeamCity has different installation packages for different operating systems. All the user needs to do is download the correct one and run it.
Pro Cross-platform build support
The fact that it is based on Java does not hinder TeamCity's ability to support different build environments. TeamCity in fact supports a large number of languages and tools for each of those languages (build runners and test frameworks).
Some of the languages/platforms that are supported include: Ruby, .NET, Java.
Pro Brilliant interface
The user interface of TeamCity is clear, well thought out and the dashboard is highly customizable.
Pro Supports build chains
The user can easily compose dependencies between builds by adding snapshot and artifact dependencies, all on the one screen. All output of upstream builds is available to downstream builds. Triggering sets off the entire build chain and supports re-running of the portions of the chain that failed.
Pro Well documented
Pro Extensible
TeamCity offers well defined APIs for extending, as well as a REST interface.
Pro Testing support
TeamCity supports both MSTest and NUnit (which is open source) to run tests.
Pro Best choice for .NET
Seems to be the best choice for .NET applications, but to be honest: if you stray from the default settings you will be in a lot of pain most of the time.
Pro Free for open source projects
Travis is free for all public repositories on Github.
Pro Easy to set up and configure
All that is needed to set up Travis is a configuration file (travis.yml) in the root of the repository where it will be installed and Travis takes care of the rest.
Pro Github integration
Travis registers every push to GitHub and automatically builds the branch by default.
Pro Supports most technological stacks
Supports the most widely used technological stacks (Node, Ruby, PHP, Python etc...) for free.
Pro OSX & Ubuntu support
Travis' VM are built on Ubuntu 12.04 64 bit Server Edition, with the exception of Objective-C builds, which are based on Mac OS X Mavericks.
Pro Multiple test environments for different runtime versions
Travis supports testing for different versions of the same runtime. All it takes is some lines in the travis.yml
file.
Pro Supports more than a dozen languages
Support for C, C++, Clojure, Erlang, Go, Groovy, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Scala.
Pro Great community
Travis CI has a large and helpful community which is quite accepting to new users and provides a great number of tutorials.
Pro Private repositories and personal support w/ TravisPro
Starting at $129 you can use TravisPro, that adds the option of closed-source, private, repositories and personal support.
Pro Excellent website user experience
Cons
Con Expensive
TeamCity has a free tier which includes a maximum of 100 build configurations and up to 3 build agents. If you want to add 10 more configurations and 1 more agent, it will cost $299; unless you choose to buy an enterprise license which starts at $1999.
Con Poor quality plugins
At least some of them do not work, probably because they're not updated to more recent TeamCity versions.
Con Inter-branch merges trigger emails to unrelated committers
Whenever an inter-branch merge occurs, TeamCity pulls up the first parent of the merge commit and sends them an e-mail. However, this sort of information would be more useful to the merge author.
Con Only partial .NET support
.NET support is limited to .NET Core and Mono.
Con Only GitHub support
It does not support BitBucket. So it's not in list for companies using BitBucket private or public repositories.
Con Relatively expensive
Commercial plans for Travis are relatively expensive compared to other tools. They start at $129/month.
Con Non-free for private repos
Travis CI was first built to serve and help Open Source Projects, but now they also have added support for Closed Source which unfortunately is not free.
Con No Windows support
Travis can only run tests on Linux and OS X operating systems; running tests on Windows is not currently supported.