When comparing Hudson vs GoCD, the Slant community recommends GoCD for most people. In the question“What are the best continuous integration tools?” GoCD is ranked 18th while Hudson is ranked 27th. The most important reason people chose GoCD is:
GoCD supports pipelines natively. This way you can build your projects by pipelining them.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Most of the features found on Jenkins are also available for Hudson
Since Jenkins and Hudson share much of the same code base, they also share many of the same features. Hudson is also very easy to install: there is simply a single .war file which is run inside the root of the directory where Hudson will be installed.
Pro Native support for pipelines
GoCD supports pipelines natively. This way you can build your projects by pipelining them.
Pro Good traceability of what contributed to a given artifact
GoCD's LEAN value stream UI helps all stakeholders focus on efficient product delivery (instead of collections of technical tasks).
Cons
Con Superseded by Jenkins
Jenkins is a fork from Hudson and therefore inherits most of it's source code. But Jenkins has far more commits and is a lot more active on the development side than Hudson. A lot of plugin developers have also chosen to support Jenkins and develop their product for Jenkins only.
Con Need Scripts for everything
Almost all operations are shell based, they are not configurations possible, your CI is as good as your scripting
Con Does not offer many plugins
Since it's relatively new and not very popular, there are few plugins available in GoCD.