When comparing Buildkite vs Concourse CI, the Slant community recommends Concourse CI for most people. In the question“What are the best continuous integration tools?” Concourse CI is ranked 13th while Buildkite is ranked 23rd. The most important reason people chose Concourse CI is:
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.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Very easy to set up
The web UI allows writing a build script inline, running a script from your repository, or creating a whole pipeline. Docker support is built-in.
Pro Allows parallel jobs
Buildkite allows you to configure your build in order to run parallel jobs and obtain considerably faster results.
Pro Scheduled builds
Run builds on a cron-like schedule to rebuild a master branch or run an import process.
Pro Run your own build servers
Run an agent on your own servers (AWS, etc) so that you have control over what your builds can access.
Pro Intergrates with VCS
Integrates with GitHub, GitHub Enterprise, Bitbucket, Bitbucket Server, GitLab, Codebase, or any custom Git repository.
Pro Affordable
One plan that gives you everything at a reasonable price.
Pro Plugin support for docker and docker-compose
Pro Concurrency control
Make sure only one deploy build runs at a time with concurrency control.
Pro Config driven build process
While you can define your build process in the dashboard, you can also run it from config files in the repository.
Pro Responsive support
Support respond quickly and listen to feedback.
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 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.