When comparing AppVeyor vs Concourse CI, the Slant community recommends AppVeyor for most people. In the question“What are the best continuous integration tools?” AppVeyor is ranked 4th while Concourse CI is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose AppVeyor is:
AppVeyor is free for public GitHub repositories.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Free for open-source projects
AppVeyor is free for public GitHub repositories.
Pro Supports Windows build enviroment
AppVeyor has a build environment for Windows available.
Pro Clear, straight-forward user interface
Well I suggest you check it out for yourself, but what I like most is that it's simple yet effective: no bells and whistles, simple black/grey/light-blue/white color scheme, it's immediately clear where you have to go for each specific task, and build settings pages are like that as well. Getting a 'standard' build running literally took me a minute the first time I used it.
Pro Easy access to build VM
AppVeyor allows the user to login to the actual build VM.
Pro The initial setup is easy
There's practically no setup involved prior to working with AppVeyor: simply sign in, add the project, and start a new build.
Pro Local iteration
Debugging on remote build agents is a nightmare (especially without isolated builds). Concourse CI can be run locally. When there are problems with the pipeline definition, it can be run and debugged locally. That means it takes less time to find and fix problems.
Pro Flexible
Resources are to Concourse as plugins are to Jenkins. In other words, resources allow Concourse CI to do just about any work necessary in a build. But resources follow a "service provider interface" that makes them easy to build in any language (not just JVM languages) and have a clearly defined computing model, built for composition. Resources don't clutter UI or tax performance.
Pro Scalable, reproducible deployment
BOSH is an open source tool for release engineering, deployment, lifecycle management, and monitoring of distributed systems. Since Concourse CI is built on top of BOSH, Concourse can scale across many servers or be run in the Cloud.
Pro Isolated builds
Build isolation keeps workers "clean". There's no configuration drift of agents. Or flaky interactions between build jobs.
Pro Usable
Visual pipeline view makes it clear what the automation does. Simple navigation to logs makes it easy to understand what happened in a build.
Pro Simple
Concourse defines three primitives that, together, can express arbitrary features and pipelines.
Cons
Con Not free
This is open-source but not free.
Con Configuration is limited
AppVeyor's configuration (which is done from the .yaml file in the root of the project) is unfortunately very limited. The configuration is either tied to a branch or, in other cases, it's global. This limits the developer to a single build process.
However, since you can use arbitrary scripts for building, all those limitations can be overcome. Configuration can also be done from the web UI without a .yaml file.
Con Limited infrastructure options
The downside of building on BOSH is that a full, scalable deployment of Concourse CI requires AWS, vSphere, or OpenStack. If you don't already have these, any one of them can be a big effort to set up, just to get a build server running. Might not be a good fit for smaller teams.