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My main use case for CircleCI involves different CI capabilities, mostly building containers and general applications. I use CircleCI for building containers and applications, specifically for our GoLang application. We have an ECS application written in GoLang which runs scans against the infrastructure. Regardless, it is completely built and managed. The configs are also stored in Bitbucket, and CircleCI is connected to it, running all the builds, processes, and deployment in the end to the ECS.

The best features CircleCI offers are probably the modules, which have great extendability. I use the modules or extendability in CircleCI primarily for classic pushes to AWS, and those include registry sign-ons and other cases.

CircleCI has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to build quicker and do things quicker. It does the job really well. These extensions are called Workflows. I have used some AWS Workflows, and there are multiple others.

CircleCI helps you build and do things quicker. It is difficult to say if there were specific improvements, but there is general reliability and probably improvements overall.

I have no idea how CircleCI can be improved. I am a user, not a developer of CI tools. I do not really have anything to add about the needed improvements, even small things that could make my experience better.

I have been using CircleCI for around a year.

CircleCI is stable.

CircleCI's scalability is great. I have never had any problems with it.

I did not deal with CircleCI's customer support.

I previously used multiple solutions. The very first one was GitLab, but it was just an experiment, because there are quite a few limitations that we had with GitLab, so we had to switch.

I cannot say if I have seen a return on investment. It is very difficult to tell.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that I only used CircleCI on the free tier.

Before choosing CircleCI, I evaluated other options, specifically Jenkins.

My advice for others looking into using CircleCI is to read more documentation. The documentation is really good. I would rate this review an 8.

On-premises

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

The main use case for CircleCI is to have build pipelines and to execute the pipelines, tests, and deployments while using it to get results and obtain a dashboard.

For a specific example of how I use CircleCI for deployments in my projects, I utilize it for continuous integration and automation to have the builds. I create YAML pipelines with it, and we first have some steps such as installing Node if it is a front-end build or installing the dependencies. After that, I build the project. Following the build, I deploy it on AWS Elastic Container Service of the image. After the image is deployed, I deploy that image on the running EC2, either in EC2 or within the S3 bucket. Then, the environment is ready, and I run the tests against that environment.

Additionally, I use CircleCI for insights and dashboards, doing some dashboarding and monitoring the results, duration, and how the runs have been, including the output and generation of reports or sending notifications to email addresses. I also connect it with Azure DevOps and GitHub.

I think the best features CircleCI offers are continuous integration and deployment, automation, parallel testing, and infrastructure as code, enabling the use of Terraform and Docker scripts, which it can run. It also provides security and compliance through security scans, linting, and compliance checks. These are key features that it offers.

Among those features, I find the most valuable in my day-to-day work the automation aspect, as we have a large product team with many developers who continuously create branches and push code, necessitating automation that builds the pipeline and the branches automatically while giving faster feedback. There is speed, flexibility, and intelligent pipeline orchestration possible with CircleCI, which we appreciate. Additionally, we have hooks and can run tasks on commit or push, which allows executions based on those events, and the self-hosted runners to run jobs on our infrastructure or use provided agents by CircleCI itself are also beneficial.

CircleCI has positively impacted my organization by bringing in faster deployments, which means we can release faster, receive quicker feedback, and enhance collaboration and communication across the entire team. We benefit from really good dashboards, build performance analytics, and optimization of resources, which allows for multiple containers or virtual machines, significantly reducing build time. Additionally, the security and vulnerability scanning provided out of the box helps tremendously, as we just need to push the code and everything is managed by our CircleCI YAML scripts.

I think CircleCI can improve in terms of pricing and needs to bring more unique selling points to stay competitive as there are many other cloud solutions such as GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps that offer similar execution and deployment services.

I believe CircleCI should leverage the growing trend of AI by offering an out-of-the-box AI-driven dynamic YAML file creation feature using natural language processing. Instead of having users define pipelines manually, users could simply use natural language to define their needs and let the AI generate the YAML configuration automatically. Implementing a multi-agent architecture could also enhance usability.

I rated CircleCI six out of ten because I think they need more transparency in pricing, as there are instances of unclear network data transfer and storage costs related to caching and workspaces. Additionally, there are sporadic platform security incidents that need addressing, and pipelines require good protection. Secret rotation should also be prioritized. There are occasionally long-running workflows that can be difficult to debug, and improvements could be made in job startup times and cache management.

I have been using CircleCI for the last five years.

The most challenging aspect during the initial setup of CircleCI in my organization was understanding how to create and implement our pipelines effectively. Although there is good documentation, determining the importance of various components for building and deploying from CircleCI to our AWS infrastructure to achieve faster deployments and feedback was initially not straightforward.

I really appreciate the good speed, which is faster and definitely the most important feature for me.

To ensure that security and compliance requirements are met while using CircleCI, we utilize restricted contexts for secrets along with short-lived credentials. We follow some regulatory guidelines, ensuring that every job runs in an isolated environment, either in a Docker container or a virtual machine. Furthermore, we maintain secret rotation and use secure API tokens while implementing appropriate access controls.

I rate this product six out of ten.