When comparing Bamboo vs Semaphore CI, the Slant community recommends Semaphore CI for most people. In the question“What are the best continuous integration tools?” Semaphore CI is ranked 10th while Bamboo is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Semaphore CI is:
Whenever a new push is made on GitHub or Bitbucket, Semaphore automatically runs tests on that branch.
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 Automatic Testing
Whenever a new push is made on GitHub or Bitbucket, Semaphore automatically runs tests on that branch.
Pro Free for open source
Semaphore supports open source and offers unlimited open source projects.
Pro Complete customer support
Semaphore offers all-around customer support for its commercial users.
Pro Free 100 builds per month for private projects
Semaphore offers 100 builds every month for private projects. This package is free for an unlimited time and offers: free & unlimited deploys, unlimited collaborators and running tests in parallel.
Pro GitHub integration
Projects can be imported from GitHub and Semaphore will automatically connect with that repository, once that's done, it will automatically trigger for every code commit.
Pro Docker support
Out of the box Docker support. Additionally, Semaphore can cache Docker images by using included docker-cache commands.
Pro Easy to configure
Semaphore is quite easy to configure and work with. It easily integrates with GitHub and a first build is only a few clicks away.
Semaphore is configured using .yaml configuration files which can be added from the web UI. There are a lot of tutorials out there that help developers configure Semaphore to their preference.
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 Proprietary with private project for $30/month
Semaphore is not free and nor is it open source. Pricing starts at $29 per month. However, there is a free option for private projects which have less than 100 builds per month and it's free for open source projects.