When comparing AppVeyor vs Travis, the Slant community recommends AppVeyor for most people. In the question“What are the best continuous integration tools?” AppVeyor is ranked 4th while Travis is ranked 7th. 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 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 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 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.