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.
External reviews
489 reviews
from
and
External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.
Automated deployments have streamlined cloud releases but configuration orbs still need simplification
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
CircleCI has been used for two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
CircleCI is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
CircleCI's scalability is easier to manage, but it comes at a high cost.
How are customer service and support?
A customer support ticket has never been opened.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
This company already had CircleCI running for several years before starting at this position.
How was the initial setup?
CircleCI was purchased through the AWS Marketplace.
What about the implementation team?
The company does not have a business relationship with this vendor beyond being a customer.
What was our ROI?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
There is not much experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing because that is managed by the legal team.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Other options were not evaluated before choosing CircleCI, but after choosing CircleCI, GitHub Actions and Harness are already being evaluated.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
A cloud solution to build automation tool with Incident Management tool integration but is expensive
What is our primary use case?
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.
What needs improvement?
The solution’s pricing could be better.
In future releases, it may provide integration with Grafana or any tool for visualization.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using CircleCI for more than eight years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's a stable product.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is a scalable product.
How are customer service and support?
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.
What about the implementation team?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Good enough CI tool
What do you like best about the product?
Intuitive and easy to navigate, and after working with it, I got used to it.
At our place, we use it for builds on every commit push and deploy jobs to different envs.
It's fairly simple, has slack and github integration, setup is easy (way easier than Jenkins at least)
At our place, we use it for builds on every commit push and deploy jobs to different envs.
It's fairly simple, has slack and github integration, setup is easy (way easier than Jenkins at least)
What do you dislike about the product?
Sometimes there's a timeout or page doesn't refresh telling you the status of a build.
Apart from that, not many issues.
Apart from that, not many issues.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
On each git commit push to a particular repo, a new build is started.
Each build has a certain steps that it needs to pass - tests, build scripts, etc.
So for each repo, whenever a new commit is pushed, we know if the commit is fine or needs changes.
Earlier we would have to run all unit and integration tests on our local systems to know if everything's fine.
Now all that and docker image builds are done on CircleCI.
And we get notifications for failures and success.
We can restart builds easily.
We can do one-click deployments to environments.
Each build has a certain steps that it needs to pass - tests, build scripts, etc.
So for each repo, whenever a new commit is pushed, we know if the commit is fine or needs changes.
Earlier we would have to run all unit and integration tests on our local systems to know if everything's fine.
Now all that and docker image builds are done on CircleCI.
And we get notifications for failures and success.
We can restart builds easily.
We can do one-click deployments to environments.
CircleCI is a good tool for fast moving teams, but not always the most convenient.
What do you like best about the product?
The upsides of circle ci are that you can Easily specify the machine that your tests run on. Defining tests are very simple (I.e the yaml definition) compared to things like GitHub actions.
What do you dislike about the product?
CircleCI doesn't live in the same place as my code. Even though there's a GitHub integration, team members have to go into the circleCI console to see why their run failed.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
CircleCI is used to test our code at all steps and making sure that our company doesn't ship breaking changes. It allows people to find errors before they are made.
Can't complain, very easy to use
What do you like best about the product?
Finding an issue in your builds is very easy
What do you dislike about the product?
Sometimes the web app takes a long time to launch.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Streamline the software build process
Circle CI is great but is down too often.
What do you like best about the product?
Easy Integration with our deployments. Great documentation and fair pricing.
What do you dislike about the product?
Downtime is inconvenient and frequent. Often blocks unexpected hotfixes that are not planned.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Automated deployments as opposed to manual. Increase in velocity and testing - It is great that many errors are caught early by circle ci.
Its ok but I prefer GitHub actions
What do you like best about the product?
Has some more features that GitHub actions don't have (eg manual approval steps)
What do you dislike about the product?
Several things are not intuitive. E.g. how do you check out a repository and then run all subsequent "run" steps in a specific subdirectory. A rich amount of public orbs is missing, compared to GH actions
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It's for CI/CD of all our services
Good mostly because free for private repositories
What do you like best about the product?
Being free for private repositories, some way to use docker containers
What do you dislike about the product?
UI/UX workflow is very heavy and unintuitive, machines often don't work
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Having a CI which is free for private repositories mostly
Better than hosting and managing your own CI/CD
What do you like best about the product?
I like how it integrates with GitHub and the UI is fairly streamlined. Also, the documentation is decent.
What do you dislike about the product?
Nothing specific, although I remember encountering issues when sorting out the dependency cache.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Providing continuous integration and automation around all of our codebases in order to ensure quality and consistency.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
I recommend trying out several comparable solutions to make sure the one you select is a good fit. Also, a managed service is preferable to maintaining your own based on experience. You need to have a fairly specific need.
Good. But lagging behind Github Actions
What do you like best about the product?
Good conceptual model for doing CI, good features, good UI. Better CI concepts. It offered simple integration with Github (obviously industry standard), good permission controls, especially across organizations. A relatively good UI and straightforward billing model (discounted when activated from Github).
What do you dislike about the product?
Lack of sharable library and buy in for said feature from community. Seems "heavy". Multiple workflows would be really nice.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment, automated deployment, builds, artifact generation and continuous testing. We maintain a mono repo and so getting builds right is important. Circle CI's caching mechanisms were especially useful there, but slightly too slow to be fully used. We ended up switching to an inhouse S3 based solution. Faster docker image downloads and better layer caching would also be particularly useful. Until Circle CI gets better at offering a lightweight experience, with multiple flows and better modularity and sharability, ill be using github. Very tight integration with Github will make the effort to use a separate platform over githubs internal options are really required.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Use Circle CI for a solid CI/CD experience, but consider Github Actions for a more lightweight, extensible experience.
showing 1 - 10