Top Continuous Integration Tools List

To set up your system for continuous integration, you will need to use a specialized CI tool, also known as a build server. There are several to choose from on the market, including some with varying purposes, so it can be confusing when trying to select the most appropriate tool for your use, particularly if you have not used them before. To help you discover which tool will be the best for your needs, we have made a list of simple reviews describing the main characteristics and possibilities of the 10 most popular CI tools on the market:

Continuous Integration Tools List

• Travis CI
• Jenkins
• Mergify
• TeamCity
• AWS CodePipeline
• Bamboo
• Circle CI
• Octopus Deploy

Further details of each tool:

Travis CI

Travis CI is one of the most famous CI tools. It is an on-premise tool and is available free for up to the first 100 builds. If you need concurrent builds then you will have to purchase a license of your preference. Travis CI is easy to use and has good documentation and support available.

URL: travis-ci.com

Jenkins

Jenkins is one of the most common continuous integration tools available and is entirely free to use. It supports cross-platform and offers configurations through console commands and graphical user interface. A major benefit of Jenkins is the extent of features on offer through plugins. The list is extensive, and you can submit your own too. Jenkins can distribute builds, and it tests load on multiple machines.

URL: jenkins.io

Mergify

Mergify combines a merge queue with CI monitoring and optimization tools. The merge queue continuously tests PRs against the latest branch state to prevent build breaks, cut integration bottlenecks, and protect code stability. CI Insights uncover flaky and slow tests and reveal pipeline cost so engineering teams can ensure that CI remains fast and reliable. It works with GitHub and supports CI providers like GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CircleCI, Buildkite, and GitLab CI.

URL: mergify.com

TeamCity

TeamCity is one of the favourites CI tools for enterprise companies. The tool is available commercially but is also free to use for up to twenty build configurations and three build agents. The tool is built in Java and is mostly used in .NET projects, due to the support available for .NET frameworks. There are also different plugins available for TeamCity which helps integration with various testing process.

URL: jetbrains.com/teamcity

AWS CodePipeline

This cloud solution from Amazon Web Services supports rapid continuous delivery of software. You can use their pre-built plugins as well as your own custom plugins to catalyze the build process. It can also be integrated with your own custom Jenkins build configurations, making CI fast and easy. It works by picking up changes from source repositories such as GitHub, and builds the solutions after running the the tests that you configured. The build will then be deployed to a staging server. AWS runs additional tests such as integration and load tests and deploys them to production servers. It uses AWS CodeDeploy and Elastic Beanstalk to implement the solution to AWS EC2 instances.

URL: aws.amazon.com/codepipeline

Bamboo

Bamboo was initially released as both an on-premises and cloud solution tool, with the cloud version later replaced by Bitbucket pipelines. Bitbucket pipelines are a quickly developing solution and an appropriate replacement for the Bamboo Cloud. The tool allows Jenkins configurations to be applied to Bamboo without any difficulty.

URL: atlassian.com/software/bamboo

Circle CI

Circle CI has both on-premise as well as the cloud versions. They refer to their pricing structures as “containers.” One container is provided free of charge, and you can build as many projects as you need. When you decide to add further containers, all with fixed prices, you can choose the level of parallelization. The container and parallelization are the factors that determine the configuration of  different,concurrent builds across different build agents.

URL: circleci.com

Octopus Deploy

Octopus deploy is the first deployment/CI tool built exclusively for Kubernetes. For those unfamiliar with Kubernetes, it’s a technology where you can take full advantage of all on-premise, hybrid and cloud infrastructures, making the process so much faster. Self-setup environments are available for Dev, QA and Devops, which helps build the solution in minutes with a single click.

URL: octopus.com

Choosing a Great CI Tool

When choosing the appropriate CI tools for your projects, there are a number of things to consider. On-premise solutions provide build process adaptability and a chance to store the artifacts locally, which some companies need. But it is not necessary to have the hardware to host them, so solutions that are hosted provide easy setup and better scalability. Also, Docker support is essential and it is something that you will need to pay attention to. Even though the number of tools that support Docker is high in number, some of the tools listed take a more dedicated approach than others. Finally, some tools on the list are easier to use than others, so having a UI which is simple and easy to use, according to your own level of experience, is very important.