When comparing CircleCI vs Cloud 66, the Slant community recommends CircleCI for most people. In the question“What are the best continuous deployment services?” CircleCI is ranked 3rd while Cloud 66 is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose CircleCI is:
Tests can be parallelized across multiple machines reducing test times drastically. They support up to 8-way parallelization. Additionally, CircleCI caches the build environment.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Very fast parallel testing
Tests can be parallelized across multiple machines reducing test times drastically. They support up to 8-way parallelization. Additionally, CircleCI caches the build environment.
Pro Easy configuration with YAML
In most cases CircleCI automatically get settings from your code. When it fails, edit circle.yml.
Pro Quick setup
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.
Pro Simple and intuitive GitHub integration
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.
Pro SSH support
Users can access the Virtual Machine via SSH and run commands.
Pro Clean, intuitive UI
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.
Pro Supports 8 languages and 16 databases
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.
Pro Headless browser support
Alongside latest Chrome, Firefox and Webkit (installed using xvfb), CircleCi supports the use of Selenium, PhantomJS as well as tools like Capybara and Cucumber.
Pro Support for Queues
Support for RabbitMQ, Beanstalk and Resque through Redis.
Pro Supports Docker
CircleCI can continuously deliver Docker images to hosts that support Docker containers.
Pro Provides time taken for each step
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.
Pro Comprehensive cache dependencies
Can specify the cache dependencies on
- checksum "package.json"
- Branch
- BuildNum
- Revision
- Environment.variableName
For more details https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/caching/
Pro Intelligent notifications
CircleCI can notify via email, Hipchat, Campfire and more. And it does so only when necessary.
Pro Can test many code pushes concurrently
You can push multiple batches of code concurrently.
Pro Supports 10 Continuous Deployment solutions
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.
Pro Run anywhere
Deploy Cloud 66 to any cloud provider or your own server.
Pro Cloud 66 Maestro - is backed up by Kubernetes
Maestro is a full container management service. With support for containers (backed by Kubernetes) and complete with support for non-container parts of your infrastructure including firewalls and network, databases (provisioning, monitoring, backups and replication), security and ACL access control, OS and server level security monitoring, deployment workflow management, and native DB and storage components and more.
Pro Cloud 66 Skycap - native CI/CD pipeline
Skycap is a container native CI/CD solution that allows you to build your image from the source code in a reliable and repeatable way. It takes your code from your git repository and runs your docker build workflow step by step. It can produce more than one image and comes complete with an intuitive UI and private Docker repository.
Pro Cloud 66 for Rails - pain free deployments
Cloud 66 for Rails builds, manages and maintains your Rails applications that can be deployed to any cloud provider or to your own server. It helps you scale your database with master-slave replication, without having to make any configuration changes. You can add back-ups, load balancers and de-commission servers with a single click.
Pro Rails, Node and Container deployment
Pro Secure
Pro Scales easily
Scaling your web, database, and process servers with the click of a button. Easy to scale vertically or horizontally, manage the workers' lifecycle and pin or move the workers to specific servers.
Pro Docker integration
A complete toolkit for deploying containers in production.
Build your image or bring your own image, deploy, manage and maintain.
Cons
Con Changes the environment without warning
Unless you count forum posts as a warning. A mysql upgrade caused days of debugging.
Con Does not cache docker images
The way to fake it is to save the image on disk, in the cache folder (it tars it), and restore it afterwards. But in tests it was slower than not caching.
Con Docker is way outdated on the VM provided
Currently (October 5th 2016), Docker installed on the VM is: 1.9.1-circleci-cp-workaround, build 517b158, and docker-compose is 1.5.2, build 7240ff3. docker-compose in particular is almost too old to be used.