Skip to main content
TrustRadius
CircleCI

CircleCI

Starting at $0 per month
View Pricing

Overview

What is CircleCI?

CircleCI is a software delivery engine from the company of the same name in San Francisco, that helps teams ship software faster, offering their platform for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). Ultimately, the solution helps to map every source…

Read more
Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

CircleCI is a widely used continuous integration and deployment tool that helps engineering teams streamline their application development …
Continue reading

CircleCI Review

7 out of 10
February 03, 2020
Incentivized
We use CircleCI as an independent part of our continuous integration testing process, which handles both automated building and testing …
Continue reading

CircleCI is awesome

9 out of 10
December 10, 2018
Incentivized
We're using CircleCI to run continuous integration for both front-end and back-end components for a SaaS application. It's linked to a …
Continue reading

Automation done right

8 out of 10
April 30, 2018
Incentivized
In our company, we develop our financial product atop the Salesforce platform. We have extensive unit test coverage that is required by …
Continue reading
Read all reviews
Return to navigation

Pricing

View all pricing

Free

$0

Cloud
per month

Performance

$30

Cloud
per month

Server

$35

Cloud
per month

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Return to navigation

Product Demos

CircleCI Demo Series - Deploy your project to AWS ECS

YouTube

How to Build, Test, and Deploy React Native Projects on CircleCI

YouTube

CircleCI Webhooks Demo | How to Get Started

YouTube

CircleCI Scheduled Pipelines | Getting Started

YouTube

Demo | Server Install of CircleCI 2.16 on AWS with Terraform

YouTube

CircleCI Demo

YouTube
Return to navigation

Product Details

What is CircleCI?

CircleCI is a shared continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, and the central hub where code moves from idea to delivery. It is a DevOps tool that processes more than 1 million builds a day, and has access to data on how engineering teams work, and how their code runs. CircleCI boasts companies like Spotify, Coinbase, Stitch Fix, and BuzzFeed as users.

CircleCI Video

CircleCI Overview

CircleCI Competitors

CircleCI Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsWindows, Linux, Mac, Docker
Mobile ApplicationApple iOS, Android
Supported LanguagesEnglish, Japanese

Frequently Asked Questions

CircleCI is a software delivery engine from the company of the same name in San Francisco, that helps teams ship software faster, offering their platform for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). Ultimately, the solution helps to map every source of change for software teams, so they can accelerate innovation and growth.

GitHub, Jenkins, and GitLab are common alternatives for CircleCI.

Reviewers rate Performance highest, with a score of 7.8.

The most common users of CircleCI are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
Return to navigation

Comparisons

View all alternatives
Return to navigation

Reviews and Ratings

(49)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

CircleCI is a widely used continuous integration and deployment tool that helps engineering teams streamline their application development workflows. By integrating tightly with GitHub, CircleCI allows for easy integration into pull request checks, ensuring that tests and linters are automatically run for every pull request and merge. Users have praised CircleCI for its reliability and responsiveness, noting that it has fewer problems compared to other CI tools they have used in the past. The support provided by CircleCI is also highly regarded, as the company continuously works on improving its product.

One of the key use cases of CircleCI is running tests on every commit to GitHub and deploying to development and production environments based on the branch. This allows engineering teams to ensure that bug-free code is shipped and accelerate the development process by automating the building, testing, and deployment of non-production environments. CircleCI also supports the automation of various build and test processes, including running pre-deploy and post-deploy scripts, executing test suites, and sending notifications through platforms like Slack.

Another important use case of CircleCI is its ability to handle the build process for different types of applications, such as Android, iOS, and web applications. By outsourcing the management of build servers to CircleCI, teams can focus more on developing custom applications while relying on a robust continuous integration and delivery solution. Moreover, CircleCI's concurrency feature allows users to split out test suites across multiple slices, significantly improving efficiency and reducing testing time. Additionally, CircleCI has been widely adopted for its cloud integration capabilities, allowing users to run automated tests in parallel containers.

In conclusion, CircleCI is extensively used by engineering teams for continuous integration and deployment pipelines across various software applications and environments. It simplifies the deployment process for Drupal and WordPress websites to platforms like Pantheon and provides a customizable environment for building, testing, and deploying workflows. With its tight integration with GitHub, responsive support team, and reliable performance reported by users from different industries, CircleCI is a popular choice for automating and optimizing the development process.

Constant improvement: Users appreciate the continuous enhancements and additions made to CircleCI, demonstrating the company's commitment to providing a high-quality product. Many users have expressed their satisfaction with the constant improvement of CircleCI.

Responsive support: The highly responsive and helpful support provided by CircleCI is valued by users when they encounter any issues. Numerous users have praised the responsiveness and helpfulness of CircleCI's support team.

Seamless integration with GitHub: Users praise the seamless integration between CircleCI and GitHub, highlighting its reliability and efficiency in not missing any commits. Many reviewers have specifically mentioned the seamless integration between CircleCI and GitHub as one of its standout features.

  1. Lack of Communication about Updates: Some users have expressed frustration with the lack of communication regarding updates and breaking changes. They have reported that it takes too long for account representatives to respond to their questions, causing delays in their workflow.

  2. Confusing Configuration Options: Users have criticized the organization of options in the config file, finding it arbitrary and unhelpful for managing their configurations effectively. This confusion has led to difficulties in setting up and maintaining their projects on CircleCI.

  3. Limited Customization Options: Several users have mentioned that they find the customization options on CircleCI somewhat limited compared to other tools like Jenkins. They desire more flexibility and control over their build processes and workflows, which they feel is not fully provided by CircleCI's current feature set.

  • Many users recommend starting with the free trial of CircleCI to get a solid CI/CD experience. They suggest taking advantage of this opportunity to explore the platform's features and evaluate its suitability for their needs.

  • Several reviewers recommend leveraging the full power of CircleCI by using orbs and workflows. These features enable users to streamline their CI/CD processes and improve efficiency in managing complex workflows.

  • Users often recommend keeping configurations simple and making use of parallelization to optimize build times. By simplifying configurations and running tasks in parallel, teams can reduce build times and improve overall productivity in their CI/CD pipeline.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 25)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Based on the cost for feature set that we needed we went with CircleCI. There were also more people on our team that knew how to use CircleCI already compared to other products which made it a preferred choice for ramp up. Other products were not as robust and quick to implement for what we needed at my company.
February 03, 2020

CircleCI Review

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use CircleCI when we need a good, independent CI/CD provider in an existing workflow. That said, we've begun investing more heavily in GitHub actions as it's closer to where our code is stored. CircleCI is a feature of a workflow, and can be filled by many different service providers; it's much more important to use one that fits well in your workflow than to choose one specifically before understanding the problem.
Sagiv Frankel | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
CircleCI is a sass product which means you don't need to maintain your own servers. This can also be a negative as you are dependent on their service. This also means you can't ssh into a machine to see what went wrong like you can with Jenkins. However for most users this isn't needed and CircleCI's SLA is fine and there is a lot of community info on the internet to solve issues you might be having.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
CircleCI seemed to have a quicker setup than other similar products, with a good integration with GitHub repos. Projects are quick and easy to set up within the UI, and workflows can then be created off the back of those fairly intuitively. Clever interpretation of commit messages can also be used to skip jobs during setup when needed.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
CircleCI is the company that is innovating compared to the other ones. I think it's a great piece of software compared to other open source options that don't have as much functionality and improved capability over time.
Dillon Welch | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
While the UI on CircleCI is not my favorite, it's leagues better than Travis CI. I really like Heroku CI much better, but the functionality is much more limited there. If Heroku CI had the same functionality as CircleCI, I probably wouldn't use CircleCI.
John Grosjean | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Jenkins and Teamcity both have additional features that maybe you require, but they are also a lot more work to get set up and working. There's a much longer learning curve to getting these configured for a simple build. They're not hosted, so you have to maintain the infrastructure and scale yourself. They're both good products if you require more than CircleCI, but if not, skip the extra headache and go with something simple like CircleCI.
Gabriel Samaroo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
CircleCI does a lot of what we need it to do; however, I believe Jenkins is a better Continuous Integration tool. Jenkins has more capabilities and integrations. In addition, Jenkins is a much more widely used tool, which means more developers are familiar with it and have experience using it. This translates to quicker development and a faster/better ROI.
December 10, 2018

CircleCI is awesome

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Not having to manage / deal with a Jenkins server is fantastic. I don't have much personally against Jenkins. I've set up and run a Jenkins server before. It's just complexity that doesn't really have much to do with the business beyond getting our software to our customers. My time is better spent on our core value, hence why having CI/CD as a service is such a great value.
September 28, 2017

A great CI/CD alternative

Yasmany Cubela Medina | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Since CircleCI gave us its infrastructure we don't have to worry about servers, provisioning and maintenance. Also CircleCI provides us great features to increase speed of builds by adding more containers to the build. Jenkins is the best open source alternative but it requires you to manage it.
Valeri Karpov | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Jenkins is usually self-hosted, Travis CI's infrastructure is largely unreliable (lots of tests time out for no discernable reason), and Semaphore encourages you to configure your CI/CD from a web UI. We like CircleCI because its hosted, our tests run largely as expected on their infrastructure, and we can configure it from a config file that we track in GitHub.
Gregory Ratner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
For us it really came down to CricleCI being the fastest and simples tool to get started with. The GitHub integration is slick and seamless and the scripting config file allowed us to configure our entire build system, including tests, in less than a day. It's very light weight and effective.
Paul Hepworth | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Circle was the first CI with simple setup, great documentation, and tight integration with GitHub. Using Jenkins was too much maintenance and overhead, TeamCity was limited in how we could customize it and run concurrent builds, TravisCI was not available for private repos when we switched.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Travis has full YML configuration in areas where CircleCI is slightly lacking still, which is great, but CircleCI offers more features, settings, and potential performance.

Codeship is simpler to use, you can use it entirely from their UI without modifying your Git repository at all. To some, this is important, existing Git repos need to be supported without adding files to them.

For others, and this is our situation, the opposite holds true--we'd rather keep our testing and deployment configuration along with our code in Git than managed somewhere separate. I believe this is a better approach in the long-term, especially when managing a large number of projects.

It also means most of our team members don't need to be in the CircleCI interface at all, possibly ever. They get added to the team, someone turns deployments on in CircleCI for the project, and then everyone can collaborate on making changes to the configuration, relying on Git's excellent merging abilities, rather than having multiple people potentially in the UI modifying configuration simultaneously, potentially reverting each others' changes.
Dmitry Sadovnychyi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Travis CI is great for open source projects – it's completely free, but CircleCI offers some support for closed projects as well. CircleCI has cheaper pricing plans, and you are able to customize them as much as you want. At Travis CI you can select only a predefined amount of concurrent jobs (2, 5, 10, etc.) while on CircleCI you can type your own number at a fixed price of $50 per container.
Andrew Shell | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I had used Travis CI in some of my open source projects. However, it was too expensive for us so I looked for an alternative that was in our budget. Scrutinizer is also very useful, but also out of our budget. When we get larger I could see myself using Scrutinizer for quality tests, but I'd probably keep CircleCI for running unit tests and doing deployments.
January 12, 2017

Fast and Easy CI

Austin Riendeau | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I think these three tools are just as good as the other except that Travis CI supports mobile a lot better but price wise, CircleCI is the best that I have found and is supports the need for a startup. For a long while, CircleCI had Docker support before Codeship but now, Codeship has support for it as well.
Return to navigation