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I use CircleCI because it allows 1 free private repo. Personally though I do not like Circle too much, it has a lot of cool features but the UI loads so slowly

I use CircleCI because it allows 1 free private repo. Personally though I do not like Circle too much, it has a lot of cool features but the UI loads so slowly because they have so much stuff going on. They use the UI skeletons technique to make the load time appear to be faster but it is still very apparent how slow the load time is. I have hit numerous bugs with their website as well where stuff doesn't load, builds kick off into infinity, when I transferred a repo everything broke, ack! Furthermore, I am frustrated with their pricing, they go from free to $50/mo for the next upgrade tier, that seems like a crazy jump to me. I would gladly pay $10/mo or so for another container or 2x parallelization. The issue is being a single developer I rarely would save any time and the $50/mo is just too steep. Finally, when I tried to build a justification case for my manager to pay the $50/mo, I wanted to use data from their CircleCI Insights which shows how long your builds are queued on average and some other important data points. But you cannot access these insights from a free account. Seems like that info should be available and prominent to help people understand the cost-savings they might receive by upgrading. I emailed support and asked for a one-time data point for that statistic to build the case as I was considering upgrading and they said sorry, nothing we can do for you. Is their goal to make money and have happy customers? If so they aren't doing a great job of it. Overall a lot of frustrations with the platform and this just adds more fuel to the fire.

daxorid 9y ago
Serious question: why CircleCI over, say, Jenkins or custom_build_script.sh running on a VPS that costs much less, and that you control?
- rhizome 9y ago
  Nobody cultivates sysadmin skills anymore. Jenkins and buildfoo.sh aren't turnkey.
  - SomeCallMeTim 9y ago
    Jenkins is also a bloody pain in the ass. Just saying.
    - azinman2 9y ago
      Also has a worse UI and setting up iOS testing is a major pain.
    - ihattendorf 9y ago
      Have you tried the declarative Pipeline[1] files? This plus BlueOcean[2] has made Jenkins much more user friendly, although obviously not as much as CircleCI/TravisCI/etc. [1] https://jenkins.io/doc/book/pipeline/ https://jenkins.io/doc/book/pipeline/ [2] https://jenkins.io/projects/blueocean/ https://jenkins.io/projects/blueocean/
      - pswenson 9y ago
        Jenkins is fundamentally broken. Upgrade any plugin and you risk everything breaking. And you won't necessarily know until you run every corner case of your build system.
        gldalmaso 9y ago
        After I changed to the LTS release channel, I have yet to suffer from that. I think it has been a couple of years without a hassle. I do wish Jenkins to be a little less high-maintenance, like say having a postgres backend and a docker image for the master. I hate having a different backup routine for each thing.
      - acejam 9y ago
        Agreed. Declarative pipelines coupled with pipeline shared libraries and BlueOcean have completely changed the Jenkins game. Pair that with the EC2 plugin and you have an auto-scaling build cluster!
      - Drdrdrq 9y ago
        Ah yes. With Jenkins anything can be customized and made better, you just need this plugin... To be fair, it was very stable, though UI was awful. Nowadays we use GitLab (selfhosted) and love it.
- avip 9y ago
  CircleCI, with all its limitations, bugs, and misfeatures, is free, hosted, integrates well with github, extremely simple - and yet has enough built-in functionality to support 80% your use cases.
- bm1362 9y ago
  Drone is a self-hosted alternative, although you still have to do some configuration: https://github.com/drone/drone https://github.com/drone/drone We went from Drone -> CircleCI -> Jenkins in the last two years. Jenkins feel opaque and hard to reason about, periodically dies for no _good_ reason and the UI is atrocious. Drone itself was fine, as a minimal feature set. I think the docs are offline now, but it's fairly straightforward.
  - acejam 9y ago
    > periodically dies for no _good_ reason You must be doing something wrong then. I run a Jenkins cluster with hundreds of automated pipeline build/deploy jobs and the master node never dies. (It's also the only node up and running 24/7) You should be offloading your work to build agents.
    - bm1362 9y ago
      I’m certain there is a reason, we scaled up and hired an infra team that owns it so it’s out of my domain now. I was merely a poor steward in the early days out of necessity. My era of tinkering ended once we moved to CircleCI.
- maccard 9y ago
  For me at least(I don’t use it, but I do outsource “core” parts of personal code) the reason is time. Time I spend setting up VPS’s, updating build software, managing permissions etc etc is home I could spend writing code. Hence why I use gitlab rather than manage a VPS and run a perforce/svn server
- jsjohnst 9y ago
  Have you setup a new Jenkins deployment recently? While I personally don't really like CircleCI (or most other CI providers), Jenkins is a clusterf@#$ to setup for anything non-trivial IMHO.
manishas 9y ago
Why not Shippable? Free for 150 builds/month for private projects, brand new UI created with a focus on usability and perf, integrates with GitHub and Bitbucket, and we're adding metrics very shortly. Upgrade to an additional container is just $25. \

daxorid 9y ago

Serious question: why CircleCI over, say, Jenkins or custom_build_script.sh running on a VPS that costs much less, and that you control?

rhizome 9y ago
Nobody cultivates sysadmin skills anymore. Jenkins and buildfoo.sh aren't turnkey.
- SomeCallMeTim 9y ago
  Jenkins is also a bloody pain in the ass. Just saying.
  - azinman2 9y ago
    Also has a worse UI and setting up iOS testing is a major pain.
  - ihattendorf 9y ago
    Have you tried the declarative Pipeline[1] files? This plus BlueOcean[2] has made Jenkins much more user friendly, although obviously not as much as CircleCI/TravisCI/etc. [1] https://jenkins.io/doc/book/pipeline/ https://jenkins.io/doc/book/pipeline/ [2] https://jenkins.io/projects/blueocean/ https://jenkins.io/projects/blueocean/
    - pswenson 9y ago
      Jenkins is fundamentally broken. Upgrade any plugin and you risk everything breaking. And you won't necessarily know until you run every corner case of your build system.
      - gldalmaso 9y ago
        After I changed to the LTS release channel, I have yet to suffer from that. I think it has been a couple of years without a hassle. I do wish Jenkins to be a little less high-maintenance, like say having a postgres backend and a docker image for the master. I hate having a different backup routine for each thing.
    - acejam 9y ago
      Agreed. Declarative pipelines coupled with pipeline shared libraries and BlueOcean have completely changed the Jenkins game. Pair that with the EC2 plugin and you have an auto-scaling build cluster!
    - Drdrdrq 9y ago
      Ah yes. With Jenkins anything can be customized and made better, you just need this plugin... To be fair, it was very stable, though UI was awful. Nowadays we use GitLab (selfhosted) and love it.
avip 9y ago
CircleCI, with all its limitations, bugs, and misfeatures, is free, hosted, integrates well with github, extremely simple - and yet has enough built-in functionality to support 80% your use cases.
bm1362 9y ago
Drone is a self-hosted alternative, although you still have to do some configuration: https://github.com/drone/drone https://github.com/drone/drone We went from Drone -> CircleCI -> Jenkins in the last two years. Jenkins feel opaque and hard to reason about, periodically dies for no _good_ reason and the UI is atrocious. Drone itself was fine, as a minimal feature set. I think the docs are offline now, but it's fairly straightforward.
- acejam 9y ago
  > periodically dies for no _good_ reason You must be doing something wrong then. I run a Jenkins cluster with hundreds of automated pipeline build/deploy jobs and the master node never dies. (It's also the only node up and running 24/7) You should be offloading your work to build agents.
  - bm1362 9y ago
    I’m certain there is a reason, we scaled up and hired an infra team that owns it so it’s out of my domain now. I was merely a poor steward in the early days out of necessity. My era of tinkering ended once we moved to CircleCI.
maccard 9y ago
For me at least(I don’t use it, but I do outsource “core” parts of personal code) the reason is time. Time I spend setting up VPS’s, updating build software, managing permissions etc etc is home I could spend writing code. Hence why I use gitlab rather than manage a VPS and run a perforce/svn server
jsjohnst 9y ago
Have you setup a new Jenkins deployment recently? While I personally don't really like CircleCI (or most other CI providers), Jenkins is a clusterf@#$ to setup for anything non-trivial IMHO.

manishas 9y ago

Why not Shippable? Free for 150 builds/month for private projects, brand new UI created with a focus on usability and perf, integrates with GitHub and Bitbucket, and we're adding metrics very shortly. Upgrade to an additional container is just $25. \