When comparing Buddy 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 Buddy is ranked 15th. 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
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Pros
Pro Easy Pipeline Setups
The ease to setup custom pipelines are amazing, can easily various settings quickly and then be ready to deploy.
Pro Multitude of Actions
Almost any action you can need and think of is already here, making it easy for you to setup your pipeline.
Pro Nice material design
The design is minimalistic and based on today's standarts on material design. It uses colors which are pleasing to the eye and displays the information in an ordered way. The main view shows the latest activity sorted in a chronological order, displaying commits and pushes.
Every repo has it's own view, on the top there's the repo's name and a dropdown which displays the current branch with the ability to change to another branch or to create a new one.
On the right there's a vertical menu with links to add a new file, show the history or to download the current repository.
Pro Free private repositories
Private repositories are free. Although they are free for up to 3 repos and each repository must be less than 100MB in size.
Pro Lots of integrations, for example discord, slack
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 Unlimited private repositories are not free
To have more than three repositories and to bypass the limit of 100MB per repository it's not free. It costs $3/month.
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.