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CloudBees vs IBM Rational Build Forge comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

CloudBees
Ranking in Build Automation
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (11th), Value Stream Management Software (3rd), DevSecOps (5th)
IBM Rational Build Forge
Ranking in Build Automation
23rd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of CloudBees is 1.2%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Rational Build Forge is 0.8%, down from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Build Automation
 

Featured Reviews

YashBrahmani - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers a clear visualization and overview of workflows and helpful in managing CI/CD processes
Improvement in the sense that they can do better in terms of management of logs and stuff like that because the console logs are very extensive, and that causes a lot of storage issues. That is one of the things which is there. Also, with respect to the traditional platform and the modern platform, many things have upgraded, and it has quite improved. But when we talk about the performance of the agents, it’s still very crucial because it’s not up to par. It takes a lot of time to provision the agent and to finish the build because of the SSH connection and the JNLP connection. Due to that, sometimes the agent doesn’t get provisioned. Those are some of the blockers that meet up the time in terms of administering the instance.
AD
Great reporting features and very functional
The solution could be more user friendly. Trying to train somebody on it can be difficult. If you're in this field, you kind of learn the tools, but trying to show a PM how to find report sheets to pull data was difficult. I had to show them how to write the queries and pull the data that they needed. It's not a layman's solution. If you're working with a programmer or with an architect, you won't have issues trying to relay how to utilize the tool. It was for those who cut the checks where there were problems enabling them to pull the data they required. I guess the answer is DevOps, but it depends on your environment. Just being able to sign into dashboards and get accurate results was my biggest thing with my PMs on my projects. They like charts and pie graphs, the ability to see things at a glance data where they could make decisions on the fly.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most beneficial aspect is that CloudBees integrates with everything, like version one, GitHub, and PDM."
"It can manage multiple Jenkins instances."
"CloudBees is a user-friendly tool."
"One recent product feature that stands out is the pipeline explorer, which is providing significant value for us right now."
"The initial setup is easy."
"CloudBees is the Jenkins tool for building and deploying. There's open-source Jenkins, which is free and can be used by any organization, but it offers a different architecture for Jenkins. If your organization is larger, you might choose the architecture. This way, you can have different masters for different applications, and different teams can manage their masters separately. However, a single person can still control all the masters, whoever manages it for the organization."
"The customer support is good. You get good representatives from CloudBees to help you and understand your requirements."
"It’s a very good tool for auditing your project pipelines as well."
"Very good reporting features."
"All features are useful. Our customer doesn't have any complaints about the tool. It works pretty well for what they want and what they need to do."
 

Cons

"A lot of stability issues are there with CloudBees."
"I noticed that CloudBees runs too slowly because some applications run more than 50 pipelines."
"There could be improvements in the ease of use."
"To use the tool, you need to be familiar with the tool itself and with how it will be incorporated into the culture."
"There are connection issues with CloudBees, specifically between Sybase and CloudBees. W"
"One challenge I'd like to highlight is that with CloudBees CI growing bigger and bigger, there are limitations in terms of managing old plugins and services and upgrading them with time."
"The setup is somewhat complicated. You need a cloud architect and engineer to set it up properly. The initial setup will take time, so you need a good engineer and architect to handle it."
"If you're logged in and working for about thirty minutes and then go idle for five to ten minutes, Jenkins will prompt you to re-authenticate."
"Its logging can be improved. When something goes wrong, it is not always very easy to find the problem. It is hard to identify whether the problem is because of low memory in the server or some configuration in Rational Build Forge. The error logs are not very detailed, and they should provide more information. It should also have more integration with third-party tools. It would be great to have more integration with third-party tools."
"Not user friendly for the layman."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Legal Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with CloudBees?
There are connection issues with CloudBees, specifically between Sybase and CloudBees. We often encounter connection problems, and there are issues with the pipelines.
What is your primary use case for CloudBees?
We use CloudBees for deploying the code in higher environments, such as QA, C2, staging, and production.
What advice do you have for others considering CloudBees?
I would recommend CloudBees to others because building jobs is much easier than with other solutions.
Ask a question
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Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Rational Build Forge
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Capital One, PEGA, vistaprint, HSBC, BOSCH, Starbucks Coffee
Cars.com
Find out what your peers are saying about CloudBees vs. IBM Rational Build Forge and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,963 professionals have used our research since 2012.