When comparing Travis vs AWS CodeBuild, the Slant community recommends Travis for most people. In the question“What are the best hosted continuous integration services?” Travis is ranked 3rd while AWS CodeBuild is ranked 25th. The most important reason people chose Travis is:
Travis is free for all public repositories on Github.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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
Pro Security
Scoped down IAM service roles and managed policies. AWS CloudTrail intergation for API access tracking. AWS Config integration for enforcing complaince rules. Native support for Parameter Store for storing/passing secrets securely to build container.
Pro GitHub cloud, GitHub Enterprise and Bitbucket cloud support
Native support for AWS CodeCommit, S3 and popular git repositories, except GitLab and Bitbucket server.
Pro Compliance
CodeBuild is compliant for PCI, ISO, SOC, and HIPAA workloads.
Pro Documentation and support
Pretty thorough documentation and troubelshooting steps in the CodeBuild user guide @ https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codebuild/latest/userguide/welcome.html.
Questions on the service forum mostly gets prompt response @ https://forums.aws.amazon.com/forum.jspa?forumID=230
Pro Availability
Had minimal to no issues with the service being available. Also, being an AWS service, it has regional endpoint across various AWS regions.
Pro Amazon VPC integration
CodeBuild can access resources within a VPC from it's build containers. Useful for customers who have resources in an Amazon VPC, like RDS instance, ElastiCache, GitHub Enterprise source repo, artifact repo, etc.
Pro On-demand CI. Zero queueing
Users get 20 or so concurrent builds per AWS account ID. Build start up within seconds with no queueing.
Pro Windows support
Support for .NET builds using windowsservercore Docker containers. Preconfigured image have .NET Core and several other runtimes like Java, Node, Ruby. Supports custom images for proprietary tooling like full Visual Studio build targets.
Cons
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.
Con No iOS support
Limited to Linux and Windows builds.
Con No support for GitLab and Bitbucket server
Off the popular git based source control management system, Bitbucket server and GitLab cloud/on-prem is missing. Generic git support is also not available.
Con No support for Docker layer caching
Customer managed images may be slower for a cold startup than CodeBuild managed ones.
Con No unlimited free builds for Open source repo
CodeBuild gives 100 free mins every month, but no unlimited free builds for Open source repository like Travis CI for example.