When comparing Bamboo 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 Bamboo is ranked 14th. 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 Fine-grained control over each environment the project needs to be deployed to
Bamboo is the only build server to offer first-class support for the "delivery" aspect of continuous delivery. Deployment projects automate the tedium right out of releasing into each environment, while letting you control the flow with per-environment permissions.
Pro End-to-end visibility when linked to JIRA, Stash and HipChat
When connecting Bamboo with Stash and JIRA, details like JIRA issues, commits, reviews and approvals follow each release from development to production. If HipCHat is part of the integration, team members get notified right away in addition to email notifications.
Pro Integration with Docker
Bamboo allows using Docker containers to create build agents. Using Docker agents lets you run multiple remote agents on the same host without conflicting requirements. It makes it easier to duplicate and distribute changes to build agents, and to use scripts for creating and maintaining agents.
How can you define and build your own image and push it to a registry to share? This is when Bamboo’s Docker tasks come into play. Docker tasks make it possible to build an image, run a container, and push a Docker image to a registry from within your build or deployment project.
Pro Out-of-the-box support for Git branching workflows
Bamboo allows you to automatically detect and build new branches, merge branches together when tests pass and continuously deploy code to staging and production servers based on branch name.
Pro Test automation
Out-of-the-box features that let developers perform parallel testing on elastic agents and quarantine flakey tests.
Pro Easy enterprise-grade administration
Avoid plugin hell by having most important capabilities as out-of-the-box features, not plugins. Bamboo is not just built for teams, but teams-of-teams. It has the administrative features you need to manage and maintain CI at scale. Enterprise model for access control, management, and support.
Pro Bundled AWS CodeDeploy task
Deploying applications with AWS CodeDeploy was always possible by using Bamboo script tasks, and it's now an easier process with a bundled add-on and its accompanying CodeDeploy task.
Pro Integration with Amazon S3
Bamboo can also be integrated with Amazon S3 for unlimited storage.
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 Very limited basic license.
Although they have $10 license it is very limited even for modest shops. Even next step of commercial license is very expensive for what you get.
Con Bamboo Cloud is going away in Jan. 2017
Migration to Bamboo Server is non-trivial and may not be worth the effort.
Con Free open-source require application to use
Bamboo does offer a free option for open source projects though it requires the user to apply for it in order to use it past the free trial.
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.