CircleCI Reviews

CircleCI is used primarily as the pipeline for application deployment. When a pull request is created in GitHub, it triggers a CircleCI pipeline because of the GitHub integration. During the CircleCI pipeline, the application goes through building and deployment to the appropriate destination, which can be a Lambda or AKS microservices.

CircleCI's GitHub integration is the best feature offered. The GitHub integration is most valuable because of its ease of use, as it only requires integration with the GitHub repository and then creating the pipeline as a YAML file within the repository code.

CircleCI has positively impacted the organization, as it has been used for many years and serves as the main source for application deployment. Every deployment is conducted through CircleCI, and this is what keeps the company functioning.

CircleCI's Orbs are not as easy to use as they could be. If CircleCI implemented a function approach similar to GitHub Actions, it would be significantly better.

CircleCI could be improved if it could function without Orbs. Instead of Orbs, using a function approach like GitHub Actions would be beneficial.

CircleCI has been used for two years.

CircleCI is stable.

CircleCI's scalability is easier to manage, but it comes at a high cost.

A customer support ticket has never been opened.

This company already had CircleCI running for several years before starting at this position.

CircleCI was purchased through the AWS Marketplace.

The company does not have a business relationship with this vendor beyond being a customer.

A return on investment with CircleCI has not been observed, and no relevant metrics such as time saved or fewer employees needed can be shared.

There is not much experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing because that is managed by the legal team.

Other options were not evaluated before choosing CircleCI, but after choosing CircleCI, GitHub Actions and Harness are already being evaluated.

For others looking into using CircleCI, study thoroughly about CircleCI's Orbs because they are quite complicated. The overall review rating for CircleCI is 6 out of 10.

My main use case for CircleCI is creating a pipeline for continuous integration and continuous delivery, which is a CI/CD pipeline.

A specific example of how I use CircleCI for my pipelines is deploying infrastructures and applications for customers. I have also completed one integration project using CircleCI where I automated the customer onboarding process to remove manual effort.

In my opinion, the best features CircleCI offers include integrations with different tools such as GitHub and other version control tools, the ability to write or integrate your code with different platforms, the option to write your own testing, and the capability to create multi-staging pipelines and single-stage pipelines with jobs.

CircleCI's integration with GitHub and other platforms has helped my workflow by allowing me to integrate with CircleCI if my code is on GitHub or on different version control tools such as AWS GitHub or AWS version control tools. With the multi-stage pipeline, I can run my pipeline in a parallel manner, and for custom jobs, I can create and run ad-hoc jobs.

The multi-stage pipeline, custom job pipeline, and the integration with GitHub stand out most to me.

CircleCI has impacted my organization positively by removing most of our manual effort and human effort, increasing speed, and removing human error, which has improved our workflow, speed, and efficiency.

CircleCI can be improved with more integrations with different cloud platforms and by providing environment security features.

It could provide integration for secrets with Vault or other security tools.

I have been using CircleCI for one year.

In my experience, CircleCI is stable, but it can be improved.

CircleCI's scalability is increasing and growing well with our workloads.

I have not contacted customer support so far because we have not needed to.

Before, I was using Jenkins to see how it would perform, but CircleCI is more user-friendly and provides better structure and collaboration, which is why we chose CircleCI.

CircleCI compares favorably to other CI/CD tools I have used before, such as Jenkins or GitLab CI. Those tools are not as user-friendly, whereas CircleCI is user-friendly, good to use, and easy to use.

The learning curve for CircleCI was easy because it is user-friendly.

I have seen a return on investment as fewer employees are needed, and our time is saved.

Before we were using CircleCI, deploying and setting up architecture or deploying an application for our customers took one or two days, but using CircleCI, it only takes around half a day, so it has improved significantly.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that we are currently using the trial version and are considering purchasing another level of CircleCI, focusing on which tier would be best for our setup.

Before choosing CircleCI, I evaluated other options including Jenkins. CircleCI is a good solution, and after evaluating other internal options, we chose to use CircleCI.

My advice to others looking into using CircleCI is to use it if you want to collaborate with multiple teams and prefer structured, user-friendly solutions with more integrations with tools. CircleCI is a perfect solution for multi-staging and jobs. Regarding compliance or regulatory requirements in my organization, we are not currently focusing on that area, so I am not aware of those concerns. I would rate CircleCI an eight out of ten overall.

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.

The solution offers continuous integration and continuous delivery.

We've had occasional connectivity issues with cloud resources and build failure due to its own internal system setup and environment. That costs us credits. Support engineers do not thoroughly read and understand issues when emailing them. They reply to me with a totally different context about the problem. Just yesterday, my web applications failed to 'yarn build' after I downgraded the resource class from extr-large to large. I contacted support and got no reply.

Billing is a mess. There is duplicate information in the bill downloaded from their website and when I asked for a consolidated bill, they just answered that they didn't have it. 

There is no transparency on how many billed minutes and credits I spent each day both on their website and the monthly bill which makes it difficult to understand when the monthly bill contains many refill item charges. 

It is difficult or impossible to track usage and burndown of my subscription and to gain total outstanding refill amounts on a daily basis. Their website doesn't provide sufficient information on credits allocated/calculated for my extra-large resource class.

I've used the solution for five years.

Support is no good! They are low-skilled and there is a long response time.

Negative

Beware of skyrocketing bills as CircleCI does not provide transparency into how they charge refills. Their monthly billing statement is almost unreadable and their online dashboard doesn't provide details on how your subscription burn downs and how much is carried forward to the next billing cycle.

Our use cases are very generic use cases, such as any kind of integration and pipeline code, the pipeline run, and any kind of information.

We use the solution to send the information to the respective service owner via any channel. So, these are the generic features that everyone is using of CircleCI.

Whatever business needs or requirements we have, CircleCI provides all those types. So, we are also integrating with our incident management tools. Integration is straightforward. For example, CircleCI integration to our GitLab pipeline and hardly takes five to ten minutes.

The solution’s pricing could be better. 

In future releases, it may provide integration with Grafana or any tool for visualization.

I have been using CircleCI for more than eight years.

It's a stable product.

It is a scalable product. 

The documentation provided is quite understandable by the developers and the integration team. So, it's self-sufficient and enables us to understand. So we didn't need to reach out for support.

We deployed the solution in-house. Developers on our site in our organization integrate this for their pipeline by themselves. We do not have any third-party help. 

We pay for the license. The product is expensive, but worth the price. The features and integrations of the tools provided are properly utilized. So, it is worth the price. 

I recommend the product for end-to-end development for highly scalable, distributed, and microservices, where there are more than 100-200 services integrating together to build a platform.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

The automation workflow in CircleCI related to third-party applications is very good and allows standardization of applications.

There needs to be some improvement in the user interface of CircleCI.

I have been using CircleCI for approximately one and a half years.

I have used Jenkins previously and I have found CircleCI is much better.

The price of CircleCI could be less expensive.

I rate CircleCI an eight out of ten.

The first thing that comes to mind is the ability to automate the build process in a seamless way and run workflows effortlessly. It supports parallel builds so it can scale well. Also, it covers the basics of any build and integration tool, including email notifications (especially when tests are fixed), project insights, etc. 

For us, this translates to high degree of productivity, ability to detect exactly which build failed and why, and being able to push multiple builds to our production environment at a very fast rate. This has increased the velocity of our product significantly.

Some of the most valuable features include container-based builds, integration with Bit Bucket (which our organization uses) and being able to store artifacts.

In addition, it has the facility to encrypt environment variables, setup SSH into the build environment, clear caches and, most importantly, is the ability to configure a Circle.yml file which is easy to understand for most users who are not in DevOps, but also for developers.

Integration with Microsoft Azure is one area for improvement. Azure is growing in its user base, and supports various cloud infrastructure components such as Service Fabric, App Service, etc. Some of Azure’s deployment models (like Kudu) require a steep learning curve, but if CircleCI would come up with such features (deployment to App Service) out of the box, it would be amazing.

At one point in time, when we were using Winston.js (an asynchronous log transport library), using a console logger on CircleCI would cause builds to fail, which is weird, and which we solved using a hack. However, we didn’t encounter any other stability issues.

No scalability issues.

To be honest, I really didn’t find a need to contact their technical support, partly because our product is simple and easy to configure. We didn’t encounter issues that we had to report to their tech support. We could find most of the answers on their Help portal.

Previously, we were using manual deployment, which was error-prone and subject to a lot of steps. Some other products, such as VSTS build services were either too expensive or too difficult to configure, such as Azure’s Kudu deployment. Hence, we were looking at alternate solutions and found CircleCI which has worked well for us.

The initial setup was straightforward in that it required a simple .yml file where we specify the sequence of steps for building and integration. Also, the scripts to  store artifacts was intuitive.

Jenkins.

I rate the product as a nine out of 10 because it is intuitive, easy to configure using the Circle.yml file, and supports container-based builds. I’m taking off one point out of 10 only because, at the time of using this product, it doesn’t have deep Microsoft Azure integration.

One piece of advice would be to consider which cloud you are going to be building on, and see if CircleCI integrates well with it. Secondly, I would advise you to try out the free version before implementing because sometimes, if the project is simple enough and if it doesn’t have a whole lot of developers (such as in startup environments) there’s no need to get more containers building in parallel.

Since I am an automation developer, I use selenium a lot. It is quite easy to run the tests in circleCI. Without using browserstack or saucelabs or xvfb, circleCI pre-installed chrome/chrome driver and firefox for you. It is quite good.

And it is fast to setup everything. My learning curve of circle is shorter than jenkins and teamcity.

save our money for buying plans of browserstack or sauce labs

save our time, do not need to setup our own xvfb, selenium grid or other stuff.

1. The feature of building CD pipeline as Jenkins: I confirmed with circleCI, this is in their to-do list

2. customized view of the pipeline and builds.

3. different triggers for the build, not only trigger by the github updates

4. If they can provide more examples in the documents? But I can find the examples in the discussion board anyway.

For half year we have used circleCI, then we go back to jenkins. Since the CD pipeline is very important to us. Our current solution is to install xvfb and firefox in the jenkins node.

CircleCI has their strength such as very easy to be used but jenkins are still very powerful, jenkins has so many useful plugins to help deployment.

And since AWS has the code pipeline and our company are moving to AWS, we are using Jenkins + AWS. So we totally got rid of CirclCI this year.

Since it was quite easy to set up the build/job in circleCI.

Very easy to set up.

Jenkins and AWS.

AWS provides more options with Jenkins. Jenkins has plugins to work with AWS. And they are able to achieve more complicated tasks. Such as triggers.