When comparing Shippable 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 Shippable is ranked 16th. 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 Builds are faster
The fact that Shippable runs inside of Docker means that it keeps a persistent state and every build will not have to revert to initial state where it needs to install every dependency from the ground up. Classic CI tools that run on virtual machines need to reset their environment every time and every time install the gems, packages and services needed.
Pro GitHub and Bitbucket integration
Shippable supports both BitBucket and GitHub. Repositories uploaded on either of those services can be built using Shippable.
Pro Free plan available
Unlimited builds for unlimited public repos and up to 5 private repositories.
Pro Docker integration
Shippable is built using Docker, a popular open source Linux container. It was originally built using it's own container but when that started to become too complex, they switched to using Docker. Since the beginning Shippable was different from other CI tools because while Shippable uses a container (Docker), traditionally CI tools have used virtual machines to manage their workloads.
Pro Quick setup
All Shippable needs for it's setup is a shippable.yml
file in the root of the repository that needs to be built. The bare minimum Shippable needs is the language and the version number specified in that file.
Pro Integrated code coverage and test results visualization
No need to use coveralls or any other tool for code coverage visualization. Code coverage and test results are integrated into the product.
Pro Build as Code
Builds are described in the shippable.yml file located in the root of your project. This empowers engineers to take responsibility for code delivery. If you are coming from Travis CI, Shippable reads your .travis.yml file directly so you can try it out painlessly.
Pro Build on your own host
Teams can set up Docker containers on their own servers and run Shippable in there.
Pro Supports monitoring and tracking utilization and system performance for your devops automation infrastructure
Pro Cheaper than competitors
Plans are significantly cheaper than competitors.
Pro Testing against multiple runtimes, versions and environments
Supports builds against multiple runtimes, environment variables, and platforms.
Pro 2X faster than any other platform
The accuracy & speed is 2x more compared to all the other available CI & CD platforms.
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 Requires way to much permissions when logging in using Bitbucket
It even requests the permission to "Delete your repositories".
Con No Direct Deploy to S3
Currently, Shippable does not allow for build artifacts to be natively deployed to S3. This can be gotten around, however it is a rather large hole when compared to Travis.
In order to deploy to S3 you have to add a couple of lines to the yml file. For example:
env:
global:
#secure variable contains values for AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
- secure: HKwYujx/qmsyQQdHvR2myu8HLUDtcLeDyYV149YJuxIV4J7Hk3SxeY8X3D6aTlR8mvMnd/ZFY+tGNUh4G0xtLLjjZcPsBgvFlB
build:
on_success:
- aws s3 sync $SHIPPABLE_BUILD_DIR "s3://bucket_name" --region "us-east-1"
Con Docker security measures may be a hindrance
Shippable runs inside Docker containers. Docker has some specific security measures which may or may not become a hindrance in using Shippable. It may be harder for users who are not very comfortable with a Linux container environment and that can create some security problems. Even for more advanced users, it's still something more that they have to address while using Shippable.
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.
