When comparing AppVeyor vs Codeship, the Slant community recommends Codeship for most people. In the question“What are the best continuous integration tools?” Codeship is ranked 3rd while AppVeyor is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Codeship is:
Support for public and private GitHub and BitBucket repositories. It also has support for multi-user teams.
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 GitHub & Bitbucket integration
Support for public and private GitHub and BitBucket repositories. It also has support for multi-user teams.
Pro Keeps it simple. Doesn't allow too many "tricky" things which means builds are generally very stable once they are up and going.
Pro Headless browser support
Alongside latest Chrome and Firefox, Codeship supports the use of Selenium, PhantomJS, CasperJS as well as tools like Capybara.
Pro Build status GIF
There's a continuously updated GIF of the build status of the repository allowing you to determine whether build was successful or not.
Pro Support for multiple tools, languages and databases
Support for e-mail, HipChat, Slack, Campfire, Flowdock, Grove, Webhook, Github Status API.
Support for Ruby, Python, Node, Dart, PHP, Java, Scala, Groovy, Clojure, Go.
Support for: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Memcached, ElasticSearch, SQLite.
Pro Supports 7 cloud providers
Support for AWS, Digital Ocean, Rackspace, Google Compute, Joyent, Softlayer, Openstack.
Pro Docker support
Pro Simple deployments with a choice of 5 deployment tools
Support for Capistrano, Fabric, Chef, Puppet, Ansible and allows for writing your own scripts to deploy and manage your infrastructure.
Pro Supports 10 hosting providers
Support for Heroku, Engine Yard, Nodejitsu, dotCloud, App Engine, AppFog, Modulus, Openshift, Cloud Foundry, Fortrabbit and you can also run your own script to deploy anywhere.
Pro FTP, SFTP, SCP, RSYNC and SSH support
You can use FTP, SFTP, SCP, RSYNC and SSH for Continuous Deployment.
Pro Code Climate & Coveralls support
Automated code review for RoR and JavaScript and test coverage history and statistics with Code Climate and Coveralls.
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 Doesn't support git modules
If repo contain private submodule - build will fail, no way to add your private key.
Con Any time you ask support for help on Codeship basic (which isn't free anyway), they will just try to up sell you to Pro version.
Con No Global variables that can be shared amongst all projects.
Con Environment variables are exposed. Any keys or secrets can just be copied.
No option to mask them unless you reduce permissions for those users. Developers need to be able to modify a job but probably shouldn't be able to copy a production api key. Just needs one more level of permissions here.
Con Too many permissions on Bitbucket
When registering with Bitbucket Codeship it requests way to many permissions, even "Read and write to your team's projects and move repositories between them". Before giving all these permissions you have to be sure you can trust this service.