AppVeyor vs CircleCI

AppVeyor is free for public GitHub repositories.

AppVeyor has a build environment for Windows available.

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.

AppVeyor allows the user to login to the actual build VM.

There's practically no setup involved prior to working with AppVeyor: simply sign in, add the project, and start a new build.

CircleCI excels with its setup process. All that's needed is a GitHub login and CircleCI automatically detects the settings for Ruby, Python, Node.js, Java and Clojure. The setup process is their most widely praised feature.

CircleCI can be connected to any project that is hosted on GitHub by logging in using the GitHub OAuth and adding the desired repository.

Whenever a new commit is pushed to GitHub, CircleCI runs the tests that have been already defined and if none of them fails, the build is deployed to the runtime environment.

Users can access the Virtual Machine via SSH and run commands.

In most cases CircleCI automatically get settings from your code. When it fails, edit circle.yml.

Tests can be parallelized across multiple machines reducing test times drastically. They support up to 8-way parallelization. Additionally, CircleCI caches the build environment.

Circle CI's web UI is clean and easy to use.

It gives all the information for a single build in a feed and gives the explanation for each step of the build, what it's doing and what the step is related to. On the top it displays author information and the time and date when the build was started and finished.

This is all done by giving only the most essential information without clogging the screen.

Support for Ruby, Python, Node, Java, PHP, RoR, DJ, JavaScript. It also detects settings for Ruby, Python, Node.js, Java and Clojure.

It als has support for: MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, Riak, Redis, SQLite, Solr, CouchDB, ElasticSearch, Neo4j, Couchbase, Lucene, Sphinx, ThriftDB, Memcache.

Alongside latest Chrome, Firefox and Webkit (installed using xvfb), CircleCi supports the use of Selenium, PhantomJS as well as tools like Capybara and Cucumber.

Support for RabbitMQ, Beanstalk and Resque through Redis.

CircleCI can continuously deliver Docker images to hosts that support Docker containers.

Eg:
./1.setup.sh 48s
./2.build.sh 56s
With this information, it's easy to find out which line of the script is the bottleneck of the build process.

Can specify the cache dependencies on

1. checksum "package.json"
2. Branch
3. BuildNum
4. Revision
5. Environment.variableName

For more details https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/caching/

CircleCI can notify via email, Hipchat, Campfire and more. And it does so only when necessary.

You can push multiple batches of code concurrently.

Support for Heroku, AWS, Engine Yard, dotCloud, Fabric, Nodejitsu, AppFog, Capistrano, Rockspace, Joynet.

Integration with Heroku is solid with the ability to automatically deploy or merge branches.

CircleCI is also very flexible with the deployment arrangement allowing SSH key management, deployment freedom including directly to a PaaS, using Capistrano, Fabric, arbitrary bash commands, or by auto-merging to another branch, or packaging code up to S3.