Poorly managed development projects are bound to crash eventually. It’s likely happened to you a dozen of times already. While writing code can be a lot of fun, managing code and dependencies can quickly become a maze of its own when you’re dealing with the continuous growth of your codebase and feature branches. At Stackify, we aim to make the lives of developers easier (and less frazzling). One way to de-stress your work is with the aid of continuous integration tools.
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Continuous Integration came as an adoption of a more refined programming practice, which aims to help developers with preventing serious integration pitfalls. As you continue to build your project, there are more things to integrate, and back-tracking can quickly become a time-consuming chore. CI Tools automate many tedious tasks and make it easier to quickly backtrack before you end up releasing a disaster, all while keeping a neat and tidy record of the growth of your project.
AWS and ThoughtWorks have done a great job at creating detailed documentations of how CI works and why you need it:
Below, we’ve rounded up 51 leading tools and software in the field of Continuous Integration. Some are core CI tools and others play nice with other tools to make CI even better, and many integrate seamlessly with the other tools and processes you’ve come to know and love (no breaking up with your favorite IDE required). Note: The following 51 CI tools are listed in no particular order.
Jenkins is the number one open-source project for automating your projects. With thousands of plugins to choose from, Jenkins can help teams to automate any task that would otherwise put a time-consuming strain on your software team. Common uses include building projects, running tests, bug detection, code analysis, and project deployment.
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Cost: Open Source
Travis CI is a CI platform that automates the process of software testing and deployment of applications. It’s built as a platform that integrates with your GitHub projects so that you can start testing your code on the fly. With customers like Facebook, Mozilla, Twitter, Heroku, and others, it’s one of the leading continuous integration tools on the market.
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Cost: Free for open repositories, Enterprise for private
TeamCity from Jetbrains is an intelligent CI server solution for software environments of all sizes. With an ample amount of features integrated specifically for developers, you will not be disappointed by the level of performance that TeamCity adds to your team. Built to support modern software stacks and platforms, you can get started within minutes using pre-built installers.
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Cost: Free, Business Starting at $299
CircleCI provides a state of the art platform for integration and delivery, which has helped hundreds of thousands of teams across the globe to release their code through build automation, test automation, and a comprehensive deployment process. With a modern approach towards the needs of modern software teams, you can rest assured that CircleCI will increase productivity, scale effortlessly, and build with confidence that your team requires.
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Cost: Free, Premium Starting at $50
Codeship is a hosted continuous integration platform that favors efficiency, simplicity, and speed. Your teams can use Codeship to test, build, and deploy directly from your GitHub project. It also works with Bitbucket. Codeship’s concise set of features combines integration with delivery so that your code is deployed accordingly once test automation has cleared.
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Cost: Free, Starter Package at $49
GitLab is a rapidly growing code management platform for the modern developer. It provides tools for issue management, code views, continuous integration and deployment, all within a single dashboard. From an idea to production stages, with GitLab you get to put yourself in a bird’s-eye view of how your project is growing and maturing. GitLab ships pre-built packages for popular Linux distributions, it installs in minutes, has a friendly UI, and offers detailed documentation on every feature.
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Cost: Free for Community Edition, Enterprise Starting at $16 per user
Besides the beautiful and rich user interface that Buddy web platform is rocking, you get a high-quality service for automating your development, without the complexity of using custom tools to do so. Buddy’s pride is simplicity, and it shines through their automated pipeline feature which helps developers to test, build and ship their software to production quicker than ever before.
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Cost: Free, Basic Starting at $49
Wercker’s CI/CD platform helps software teams to achieve their goals using Docker and microservices. Using container-specific and cloud-native automation features, teams can test and deploy their apps hassle-free. Wercker’s customers praise the platform for being highly efficient towards an automated build and deployment process, making a clear distinction between errors and hiccups along the pipeline.
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Cost: Free for Community Edition, Virtual Pipelines at $350
Semaphore CI provides cloud-based continuous integration and deployment built for speed and simplicity. With Semaphore your team can stay on top of the latest bugs and errors, way before they reach the attention of your users. With a seamless GitHub integration, your tests are automated the moment you plan to push out new code changes.
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Cost: Free for 30 Days, Business at $25 per box
Solano Labs prides itself over its blazing fast platform for Integration and Deployment needs. Customers have reported a significant increase (up to 100x faster) in their time-saving thanks to Solano’s comprehensive tools that streamline your build testing. Solano offers solutions for SaaS companies, private corporations, and cloud-oriented businesses that want to improve the efficiency of their resources.
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Cost: Free 14-Day Trial, Premium Starting at $100
AppVeyor is a Windows-only cloud-based service for testing, building, and deploying Windows applications. Windows devs use AppVeyor’s comfortable technology to conclude their tests and deploy applications in the cloud or in a physical server environment. With pre-installed software like Visual Studio and your favorite SDKs, you can quickly get up and running with a solid CI environment.
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Cost: Basic at $29, Premium at $99
Change the way you look at quality assurance using Assertible’s infrastructure for continuous testing and monitoring of your apps, websites, and API’s. Assertible’s strong set of features enables teams to worry less about bugs making their way into production, and rather promotes a safe testing environment where everyone has a chance to make the most out of their productive hours at work.
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Cost: Personal is Free, Standard at $25
Shippable came out of the necessity to give software companies a way to accelerate their growth, without the time-consuming limits of manual labor. Shippable is an integrated platform that’s built with a single purpose to help teams streamline the process of pushing apps to production, apps that have been tested and built for security and stability. Shippable’s mission is to level the playing field by commoditizing custom built CI/CD platforms that companies like Facebook and Amazon rely on and enable every business to evolve faster.
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Cost: Free, and Premium at $25; Server options available for teams
Nevercode is a cloud-based CI and CD server that automates the process of building, testing and distributing mobile applications. It requires zero assistance from human personnel, making it highly flexible and reliable at the same time. While many mobile app developers are struggling to set up and maintain their CI workflow, you won’t have to worry about any of that using Nevercode’s direct approach.
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Cost: Free Hobby Plan, Freelance at $43. Enterprise Starting at $263 and $571 for rapidly growing companies.
Bamboo is a CI server being used by software teams across the globe to automate the process of release management for applications and general software, allowing teams to establish a streamlined pipeline of build delivery. Bamboo gives developers a chance to automate their build and test processes, in turn freeing up time that can be spent improving the product itself. Mobile developers can deploy their apps back to the Apple Store or Google Play automatically.
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Cost: $10 for Small Teams; $800 for Growing Teams
GoCD is an open-source continuous delivery server, ideal for automating and streamlining your cycle of builds, tests, and production releases. Built for individual teams and growing businesses alike, GoCD provides a business continuity concept that lets you set up multiple servers to keep your data available in the case of an emergency. Enterprise plans are available through the founding company, which is ThoughtWorks.
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Cost: Open Source
While PHPCI doesn’t compare to the functionality that of Jenkins, it is a simple and easy to use continuous integration platform for PHP developers. With the fast integration of Bitbucket, GitHub, and local environment, you can have your integration process streamlined as quickly as necessary. If PHP is your daily bread and butter, then PHPCI will ensure that you’re deploying apps that have survived the test of stability that PHPCI provides.
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Cost: Open Source
Distelli is a growing startup from Seattle that plans to change the way that devops are deploying to their servers, providing an integrated cloud-based service for doing so. With investors like Andreessen Horowitz on-board, Distelli specializes in deployment to Kubernetes, whether it’s hosted on the cloud or your own physical location. A stunning cluster management dashboard lets the team build and connect clusters from anywhere while having the ability to manage them all from a single dashboard.
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Cost: Free, $39 for Teams; $119 for Growing Business
FinalBuilder from Vsoft is a Windows software for automating your build process. Despite being efficient to use by itself, it can integrate with any of your favorite CI servers, including Jenkins. The key advantage of FinalBuilder is its flexible graphics interface that provides a straight-to-the-point visual outline of your build process. It can often take a long time to evolve a batch file or script to the point where it is reliable enough for use, whereas automating the build process with an automated build tool such as FinalBuilder is quick and easy.
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Cost: Starting at $599 for Professional, and $359 for Standard. $5000+ for Large Teams
Hudson CI is written in Java based on servlet containers such as Tomcat and GlassFish. Hudson seamlessly supports your favorite SCM tools, the likes of Git, CVS and Subversion. Builds can be started by various means, including scheduling via a cron-like mechanism, building when other builds have completed, and by requesting a specific build URL.
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Cost: Open Source
Buildkite has been in the business for the last four years, providing software developers and their respective teams with an easy way to create a self-hosted CI environment. The tool was initially born out of the frustration of the founder, who saw that there’s clear lack of self-hosted CI solutions that provide effortless functionality at a fair price. Today, developers acknowledge the fast performance that Buildkite provides.
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Cost: $15 per user, per month
CruiseControl is an open-source framework built with Java that oversees your continuous build process. It comes equipped with a flexible web dashboard to overview the details of your builds. At its core, it’s a continuous integration platform that can improve the process of developing software. Through plugins, devs can extend their workflow beyond the basic functionality.
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Cost: Open Source
Integrity is a simple Ruby-built CI server that builds, tests, and verifies your code as soon as you publish new commits. The settings are easy to navigate and simple enough for teams of all sizes to get up and running.
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Cost: Open Source
QuickBuild is a powerful platform for CI and CD streamlining. Utilizing a fast, performance-oriented core system, it gives software teams a reliable solution for creating custom scripts to manage override rules and includes a ton of useful variables for better deployment workflows. QuickBuild, although providing an open-source environment, is best recognized for its Enterprise-level plan, which comes with a premium support console where those with a license can get a more thorough understanding of their infrastructure.
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Cost: Free with Open Source License; $3600 for Enterprise License
UrbanCode from IBM is built to be used by serious software companies that require a concise integration of tools for managing complex builds, which cannot be managed effectively through the use of low-level tools. Thousands of big corporations across the world are using uBuild to solve their most complex build requirements. In Agile development, uBuild is used to automate Continuous Integration builds, nightly builds, automated unit or functional tests, deployments, releases, or any other process in the application lifecycle.
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Cost: Free Trial; contact for a quote
The Apache Foundation doesn’t hold back when it comes to pushing out great products, and Gump is definitely among the better ones; it’s an open-source CI system that provides building and testing capabilities for Java projects. At the core of Gump is a valuable tool to provide developers with a way to ensure their projects are functional and compatible at all levels of development.
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Cost: Open Source
Chef has been providing software engineers with a reliable configuration management platform for the last eight years. Written with Erlang and Ruby, the main aim of Chef is to provide an automated environment for how your infrastructure is managed, deployed, and configured — regardless of the size of your network. Chef can be effortlessly integrated with cloud services, physical servers, and hybrid solutions.
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Cost: Open Source with Business plans available (contact for a quote)
Strider’s an Open Source CI & CD platform written with NodeJS and JavaScript that integrates MongoDB as the back-end database storage. Strider gains popularity among developers for its ability to enable the creation of custom testing servers, which are direct clones of the production environment.
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Cost: Open Source
Buildbot is a Python-built CI testing framework, highly acclaimed among companies like Mozilla and Chromium. Buildbot’s primary function is to act as a bridge for concluding automated tests and builds. Buildbot supports not just continuous-integration testing but also automation of complex build systems, application deployment, and management of sophisticated software-release processes.
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Cost: Open Source
BuildMaster, from the hard working folks at Inedo, is an app release automation platform. It puts together the powerful capabilities of build management and ARA to create an automated process of continuous integration, database changes, and build deployments. As a web-based tool, it is easy to start using, and all features are ready to go at just a single click away. Configuration is achieved solely through the web user interface, so you don’t have to deal with script configurations.
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Cost: Enterprise Edition Starting at $1,995 for 10 Users; Express is Free
Puppet’s platform is built to manage the configs of Unix and Windows systems. As software, it’s an Open-Source config management tool. Puppet gives developers a way to deliver and operate their software regardless of its origin. Using Puppet’s manifest, you can declare the over frame framework for your infrastructure and apps that you’re building, which gives you a model to use Puppet against for testing, sharing, and deploying changes.
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Cost: Free Trial, $3,000 (500 nodes) and up
An enterprise-ready continuous integration server, Apache Continuum offers time-saving tools such as automated builds, release management, and everything you need to streamline continuous development.
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Cost: Open Source
Visual Studio Team Services helps teams plan better, code together, and ship faster. You can code in any IDE and language, for any target platform, integrating your favorite tools from the marketplace to create your ideal development environment.
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Cost: Free Trial for Team Foundation Server, get started with the Cloud Service free
An affordable, scalable continuous integration server, Continua CI offers an intuitive user interface and supports a variety of tools you already use, such as Visual Studio, MSBuild, Ant, Nant, Rake, Git, and more.
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Cost: Unlimited Project, Unlimited Configurations, Unlimited Users Free, Additional builds start at $199
CABIE is a continuous automated build and integration environment written in Perl. It’s been around and actively in use for more than seven years, making it one of the most established CI tools, particularly among Open Source options.
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Cost: Open Source
OpenMake Software is a DevOps continuous delivery platform designed for Agile methodologies, offering continuous delivery tools that enable dev teams to go the “last mile” in Agile. Meister accelerates continuous integration by using build automation to manage, control, and speed up the software compile and link process.
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Cost: Free for small teams; Flexible “Pay as You Grow” enterprise pricing starting at $1,000 per application per year
Vexor.io is a cloud continuous integration service offering unlimited parallelism with pay-per-minute, as-you-go pricing.
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Cost: $0.15 per minute, 100 free minutes per month
A continuous delivery platform built on Docker, Drone.io features a comprehensive plugin marketplace to allow developers to create custom configurations that best support their development needs.
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Cost: Open Source
Buildout is a Python-based build system enabling you to create, assemble, and deploy applications from multiple parts — even parts not Python-based. Easily create a buildout configuration and reproduce the same software later with Buildout.
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Cost: Open Source
easyCIS aims to provide a simple solution to the problems associated with integration, build, and management. An intuitive and easy-to-use system, easyCIS is independent of development methodologies, meaning you can use it regardless of your working style.
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Cost: Open Source
The only native release management solution for Salesforce, Flosum provides application lifecycle management for Salesforce developers, complete with executive dashboards offering total visibility and more.
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Cost: Free Trial; contact for a quote
XL Deploy is a XebiaLabs offering, working best when paired with Jenkins for a consistent way to package and deploy your applications from Jenkins to all your target platforms. You get complete control for automating and scaling your deployment process with much less hassle.
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Cost: Free trial, contact for a quote
A Docker-native CI and CD platform, Codefresh helps you instantly build, test and deploy Docker images, running the entire container lifecycle from start to finish.
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Cost: Open Source, free for 1 build; pricing starts at $99/month for 3 builds
A powerful application development and release automation tool, MidVision Rapid Deploy is built for DevOps teams and enterprise CD. Delivering consistent high-volume deployments, Rapid Deploy is the robust tool enterprise developers need to support rapid development.
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Cost: Free Community Edition for use on 5 nodes or fewer; contact for a quote
Cake is a cross-platform build automation system that helps you compile code, copy files and folders, run unit tests, compress files and build NuGet packages with ease.
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Cost: Open Source
A hosted continuous integration and delivery platform, Magnum CI is made for private repositories. It integrates with your favorite code hosting provider including GitHub, Bitbucket, Gitlab, and more.
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Cost: Currently in public beta; pricing plans to be announced soon
Buddybuild helps you ship apps faster with continuous integration, continuous deployment, and user feedback tools for iOS and Android development teams.
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Cost: Pricing by plan, starting at $219/month for 3 concurrent builds
Phabricator provides all the applications your project needs in a single tool. Discuss, plan, code, review, and test from the same interface with this feature-rich tool suite.
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Cost: Free up to 5 users; paid plans start at $20/user/month
An open-source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform for releasing rapid software changes with confidence, Spinnaker is a highly configurable, safe tool to speed development and leverages industry best practices out of the box.
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Cost: Open Source
Bitrise offers mobile continuous integration and delivery with dozens of integrations for seamless operation with the services you already know and love. Build apps with Bitrise for iOS, Android, and Xamarin with consistency, confidence, and speed.
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Cost: Bitrise provides open source tools and a hosted CI service priced at $50/concurrent build
OctopusDeploy works with your build server to automate releases of ASP .NET applications and Windows services. OctopusDeploy enables reliable, secure, and automated releases into several different environments — including test, staging, and production — both on-premises and in the cloud. Instead of replacing your source control and build servers, OctopusDeploy takes over where they leave off, taking your build artifacts and configuring and distributing them to all machines and environments you need them to run on.
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Cost: Free for small teams, even for commercial use. Professional plans start at $700; Enterprise plans start at $5,000/year.
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