The Ci/CD pipeline tools are considered as highly effective technology solutions for businesses in DevOps activities among many different software development tools. So what is a Ci/CD tool that is used in DevOps? What benefits do these tools bring to companies? Let’s find out!
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What is Ci/CD pipeline tool?
The Ci/CD pipeline is a set of DevOps pipeline tools and processes used by developers, test engineers, and IT operations professionals throughout the continuous software development, delivery, and deployment lifecycle.
Ci/CD delivery workflow consists of 2 distinct components: continuous integration and continuous delivery. These pipeline tools help DevOps teams accelerate time to market, improve quality, and reduce costs by automating software building, testing, delivery, and deployment functions, while simultaneously eliminating manual workflows prone to human error.
5 key features of DevOps pipeline tools
The list of Ci/CD pipeline orchestration tools in DevOps is very diverse with many distinct features that make software development process work smoothly. Specifically, there are 5 crucial aspects below:
Easy to install
Ci/CD pipeline orchestration tools in DevOps is simpler than many traditional software development processes. This activity takes place only through 3 steps: Build-test, monitor and deploy.
In addition, these steps are integrated into a continuous, closed circle. Thanks to that, the software development process in enterprises is also shortened. Therefore, Ci/CD pipeline tools are often easy to install and do not take up too much data. This is also probably the first and foremost factor for using these products.
Focus on Developer
Ci/CD pipeline tools has become practices in the software development process and also a key element for the appearance of the phase-software development and testing.
Ci/CD also becomes the best tool which makes the application can be developed at any time and then pushes that implementation code into the production repository when new code is available. DevOps Ci/CD pipeline tools are always focused on serving software purposes. Therefore, developers will have to build and deploy software throughout on both personal computers, because the Ci/CD process is highly automated.
Collaboration support for DevOps
DevOps and Ci/CD are closely related in practice. Technical teams will start work with Ci when DevOps helps members understand the configurations and combinations to define software for creating more valuable CDs. The practice of Ci/CD pipeline tools will accelerate the entire development process. Undeniably, the combination of continuous integration and continuous delivery really makes a big difference.
Integration ability
The essence of Ci/CD is a software development method that integrates the work of arrays and members on a regular basis, at least once a day. Each integration is “built” automatically (including tests) to detect bugs as quickly as possible. The team found that this approach minimized integration issues and allowed for faster software development.
Scalable for enterprise
Scalability is a characteristic of the DevOps Ci/CD pipeline tools to cope with and perform well across a wide range of software processing workloads. A well-scaled system should be able to maintain or even increase its level of performance or efficiency even as it is challenged by larger operational demands. So those pipeline tools are really the best solution because they can be easily and quickly scaled up against the huge software needs of enterprises.
Top 35 CI/CD Pipeline Tools of 2023
Jenkins
Jenkins acts as a central heart of Ci and CD systems. It is equipped with Java 8 WAR archives and installation packages for the common operating system in the form of Homebrew. Such packages will include images and source code. Basically, the source code here is mainly Java, including Croovy, Ruby, and Antlr files.
You can run Jenkins War alone or with a server servlet of Java software similar to Tomcat. In both cases, Jenkins will provide a certain interface to the user and allow calls to the Rest API.
Teamcity
TeamCity is a real Ci server, from the company JetBrains. JetBrains has built a license in the software development market worldwide, and their tools like WebStorm and ReSharper are widely used by programmers around the world.
Some highlight characteristics:
- Provides all the features in the free version
- Limited to 20 configurations and 3 server builds (2018) and 2020 free versions increase to 100 configurations, so if you want to use more, you have to pay.
- Works on a variety of platforms and has support for a wide variety of tools and frameworks
Secure and extremely stable plugin delivery.
CircleCi
CircleCI is one of the top Ci/CD tools that makes it easy to apply Ci/CD projects. Just log in with a GitHub account and your repos can connect to CircleCI.
Characteristics:
- Powerful hosting and highly customizable workflow
- Easy to set up and run.
- Can configure and send results directly to Slack….
- CircleCi currently only supports GitHub and BitBucket, and the list of languages includes Java, Ruby/Rails, Python, Node.js, PHP, Haskell, and Skala.
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Travis Ci
Travis CI is one of the oldest hosting solutions in the Ci CD pipeline tools list, which is available today and has been trusted by many people. While it is largely known for its hosted solution, it also offers the above-premise version as an enterprise plan.
Bamboo
Bamboo is a Ci server used by various software teams around the world to automate the release management process for apps and software. As a result, the team has a streamlined pipeline of different builds. Bamboo allows developers to automate the build and test process to allow more time for product improvement. Mobile developers can automatically deploy apps to the Apple Store or Google Play.
GOCD
GOCD is a free and open-source Ci/CD server with an easy model and complex workflows. It supplies end-to-end visualization cloud-native deployments and advanced traceability.
GOCD integrates with many popular external tools and services via its extensible plugin architecture.
GitlabCi
With the rapid evolution from code management platforms to developers, GitlabCi provides tools for issue management, code views, continuous integration, and deployment, all in a single dashboard. From ideation to product development, with GitLab, you’ll get a clearer, more detailed, top-down view of how your project will evolve. GitLab offers pre-built packages for Linux distributions, installation will take place in just a few minutes, with a friendly UI, accompanied by extremely detailed documentation.
Jenkins X
Jenkins X is a sub-project of Jenkins. The functionality is completely similar to Jenkins, but in a new direction, which is a native cloud-oriented Ci/CD pipeline on the Cloud platform. It was born not to replace Jenkins but was built with a pure Ci/CD concept on a Cloud platform running on Kubernetes. When installing Jenkins X, we are ready to have a true Ci/CD pipeline, with no need to install any additional applications, all integrated (Helm, Jenkin, Nexus, Monocular, Chartmuseum, Docker Registry,…).
Shippable
Built by the industry-leading software company, Jfrog, Shippable is one of the best DevOps pipeline tools. DevOps engineers can use this tool to create regular, bug-free software releases.
Providing support for Docker, Shippable’s automation platform streamlines the development, testing, provisioning, and deployment of applications anytime, anywhere.
Buildkite
Buildkite is a CIaaS engine that provides fast, secure, and scalable CI on top of private infrastructure that can be managed from a flexible web interface. It seamlessly integrates with MacStadiums Orka, an orchestration group powered by Docker and Kubernetes that provides virtualized MacOS build machines that run on real Apple hardware.
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Concourse Ci
Concourse is an open source for Ci/CD. Because this is open source, developers can customize the Ci/CD core set. And Concourse is built on a simple mechanism of resources, tasks, and jobs.
Codefresh
Developed on Kubernetes, Codefresh provides full support for GitOps and integrates with well-known tools, such as Puppet, Pulumi, Terraform, Slack, GitLab, Bitbucket, and GitHub.
With the integrated Kubernetes Console, Codefresh empowers developers with increased visibility, unlimited scalability, and exceptional speed across multiple platforms, including Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Kubernetes.
Along with the best Ci/CD tools on the market, Codefresh comes with parallel build support and it comes in both on-premises and cloud variants. This tool also has a CLI (Command Line Interface) called Codefresh Runner. It provides a scalable and secure way to deploy code, trigger builds, and run tests.
Buddy
Buddy is a “decentralized automation platform”. By automating application development, Buddy makes application building scalable, reducing the time and effort required from developers. Buddy applies self-control to app development, enabling application design to scale, creating a DevOps trading platform, and a GRID-distributed automated control grid, which is currently underway.
Buildbot
Buildbot is a job scheduling platform that can be used to automate software builds, testing, and releases. It can automate all phases of software development. Engineers monitor the source code repository for changes, coordinate worker activities, and report the results to users and developers. Workers run on multiple operating systems.
Semaphore
Semaphore is known as the top ci/cd tool for high-performance engineering teams.
It can configure your Ci/CD pipelines exactly the way you need them to run. From simple sequential builds to multi-stage parallel pipelines, Semaphore can do it all for any team size and organization. Besides, Semaphore also helps eliminate the Ci/CD gaps that exist in your engineering team to reach maximum velocity and move forward at unprecedented speed.
Wercker
Wercker is an automated platform and a series of tools to help you speed up the development process, and build and deploy projects. Wercker will help you build and test the application you develop automatically, so you can focus more on creating the product you want and don’t need to worry about the above issues.
Integrity
Integrity builds your code, runs your tests, and makes sure everything works fine. It then reports the build status using various notifiers back to you and your team so everyone is on the same page and problems can be fixed right away.
Weaveflux
This Ci/CD pipeline tool allows you to create workflows directly in a GitHub repository. This helps make everything more manageable from a single place. GitHub allows you to build, test, and deploy code. GitHub makes code review, branch management, and testing pretty easy and manageable.
Codemagic
Codemagic is the most powerful and trusted software creation tool for developers, allowing you to leverage your preferred framework and automate the entire build, test, and release process with code magic, YAML that integrates with your technology stack.
Codemagic’s rapid response to teams helps you accelerate your app development by saving development time that would otherwise involve manual build, test, and release steps.
Autorabit
Autoabit is the only complete DevOps platform for optimized and streamlined Salesforce application development. It also becomes one of the Best-in-class integration and delivery tools that enable you to quickly introduce new updates.
CruiseControl
CruiseControl is both a continuous integration tool and an extensible framework for creating a custom continuous build process. It includes dozens of plugins for a variety of source controls, building technologies, and notification schemes including email and instant messaging. A web interface provides details of the current and previous builds. And the standard CruiseControl distribution is augmented through a rich selection of 3rd Party Tools.
Bitrise
Bitrise is a fully hosted DevOps and Ci/CD for Mobile, which has full support features for iOS, Android, and other major mobile platforms, with a project scanner that helps with the initial setup. It automates your processes by using platform-specific integrations that are tailor-made for mobile development, analyzes build metrics with insights to improve speed and efficiency, and uses data to track Ci performance and test flakiness.
Drone Ci
Drone is a continuous integration and deployment service in the cloud designed to automatically build, test, and deploy your code without human assistance.
Urbancode
UrbanCode IBM is an application release automation tool in the list of Ci/CD pipeline tools that automates software deployment to local and cloud-based environments. The software enables seamless deployment to distributed data centers, clouds, and virtualized environments as often as needed.
Strider
Strider is an open-source and continuous deployment / continuous integration platform. It is written in Node.JS / JavaScript and uses MongoDB as a backing store. It is published under the BSD license. Strider is extremely customizable through plugins.
FinalBuilder
FinalBuilder is a commercial Windows build automation tool that provides a unified graphical interface to author and programs build projects. Once defined, a project can only be run either via the graphical interface or command line program to execute build projects. A project consists of actions, of which there are around 650 types defined as of version 6. Projects are stored in a zipped XML format.
GitHub Actions
GitHub Actions is an event-driven program that runs a series of commands when you receive an event, for example, every time a developer makes a pull request for a certain repository, the build command is executed.
Azure DevOps
It is one of the famous Ci/CD tools in DevOps which was developed by Microsoft for infrastructure development. Azure lets you build, test, and deploy with continuous integration and continuous delivery in any language, on any platform or cloud.
Terraform
Terraform is an open-source tool that allows you to define infrastructure with a variety of cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean … or even sphere Center VMware… It is simple to use, and it is a language for declarative programming, deployment, and system management with just a few CLI commands.
Tekton
It is an open-source visualization platform that provides a flexible and powerful workflow for Ci/CD systems. Tekton allows you to build, test, and deploy code on any system and cloud server. It is known to be one of the best tools for Kubernetes users.
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Spacelift
Spacelift is a collaborative infrastructure for modern software teams. It is a sophisticated platform of pipeline tools for Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, and Kubernetes. Automated workflows in Spacelift help everyone understand the impact of proposed changes, providing continuous delivery to the infrastructure your teams need.
Juju
Canonical’s JuJu automates cloud infrastructure and deploys application architectures. This tool uses Charms, a collection of scripts, to simplify configuration, maintenance, deployment, and scalability.
DeploybotHQ
DeployBot is a software deployment application that automatically deploys code from GIT repositories. Deployments can be triggered automatically or manually, and code can be executed or compiled on servers during deployment, using predefined or fully customized Docker containers.
PDQ Deploy
PDQ Deploy provides the ability to remotely install software or patches for Windows systems. Built-in ready-to-deploy packages are available for applications like Adobe Flash, Java, Firefox, and more for all computers.
10 best DevOps pipeline tools in comparison
| Offering ⭐ | Pricing ⭐ | Verdict ⭐ | |
| ✅ Azure Pipelines | Comes with lots of useful tools like Boards, Repos, etc. Can connect to your GitHub repo. Automatic integration with built-in CI/CD pipeline. In addition to Azure apps, thousands of community apps are also available. Templates are available for many types of agile. Provide custom reports. Integrates well with Azure Cloud. |
It is priced at $40 per Microsoft-hosted CI/CD parallel task and $15 per additional self-hosted CI/CD parallel job with unlimited minutes. | Azure DevOps is a great Ci CD pipeline tool for testers and developers who want other tools along with a CI/CD server. Subscribing to different tools will cost you much more than using Azure DevOps. Even so, I wouldn’t recommend using Azure DevOps as your first in the list of pipeline tools. It is more suitable for experienced people. |
| ✅ Bamboo | Integrating language agnostic with multiple platforms Dedicated agent focused on specific construction projects Full reporting of upcoming code changes and issues |
Pricing starts at $1500 for one remote and unlimited local agents. | Bamboo continuously automates release management for common applications and software, allowing teams to establish a streamlined build delivery pipeline. It quickly and efficiently ties automated builds, tests, and releases into one integrated workflow. So it is suitable for enterprises. |
| ✅ Docker | Docker is one of the bestpipeline tools for developers and system admins to develop, deploy, and run applications with containers. It allows to create independent and isolated environments for application launch and development, and these environments are called containers. When you need to deploy to any server, just run the Docker container and your application will be launched immediately. | Pricing for this CI/CD tool starts at $7 per user on a monthly basis. | Using Docker or similar technologies brings a lot of benefits to product implementation and deployment. Therefore, understanding technologies like Docker are essential for DevOps in particular and should be learned for developers in general. |
| ✅ GitLab | Inherit the advantages and power of Git and GitHub. Provides comprehensive analysis for projects. Support for Docker containers. Files can be split into branches resulting in organized code management. Support collaboration and support notifications. Secure because it performs security checks, scans the container, and does experimental testing on the code. Supports efficient automation algorithms. Supports a long list of integrations. |
GitLab is free for individual users and costs $19 per user for teams. | GitLab is emerging as the most powerful of Ci/CD pipeline tools but it only integrates with Git. If you don’t use Git or don’t intend to use it in the future, GitLab is not the tool for you. Also, for Git users, GitLab is an extremely useful tool and you can always start your projects with GitLab. |
| ✅ Harness | Harness products help to build, test, and deploy Harness in all environments (pre-QA, QA, Stage, and Prod). Essentially we‘re dogfooding ourselves to see how our product is performing in real-time scenarios. | It costs $100 per service per month. | Harness enables everyone here to find bugs before they reach customers. Furthermore, it enables everyone to contribute to finding gaps in the product, which leads to feature development in Harness. Last but not least, it improves the User Experience as well. |
| ✅ Jenkins | Simple installation and easy to use tool (packages included). Simple user interface. Huge plugin support with 1500+ plugins Large community. Support building distributed master-slave architecture. Windows shell and commands are supported in the pre-build steps. Jenkins supports Windows, Linux, and macOS platforms. |
Jenkins is free to use. | Jenkins is a great tool if you are looking for free, heavy-duty, and open-source Ci/CD pipeline tools. One great thing about Jenkins is that you can develop your own plugin if you think some features are missing. This way you will have a fully equipped tool. |
| ✅ Octopus Deploy | Dashboard showing deployment status Installation and setup completed quickly Automated deployment to virtual machines on site or in cloud services |
It is free for up to ten deployment targets and costs between $7 and- 9 per target each month in the cloud. | Octopus Deploy is an automated system designed to simplify the deployment of ASP.NET applications, Windows Services, and databases. It allows software developers to automate application deployment, whether on-premises or in the cloud. |
| ✅ Travis CI | Supports multiple languages like C, C#, PHP, Python, Java, Perl, etc. Supports deployment of various cloud services. Comes with pre-installed applications on the server. Support pull request to build branch. |
Pricing starts at $69 per month. | Travis is a great start for Git lovers and those with free open-source projects. Travis did show some slowing down when the project started to pick up a bit. Also, the integration causes problems if not working on GitHub and Bitbucket. |
| ✅ Opsera | Opsera allows a zero-code approach to automation, enabling you to automate any CI/CD stack without writing a single line of code. You may pick your tools through a graphical user interface and also get extensive analytics on the performance of your CI/CD pipeline. | The tool is custom priced. | Opsera is relatively new in the DevOps segment but has enormous potential. It has won several awards and adoption by enterprises like Honeywell and Autodesk in the recent past. However, the lack of maturity means that there is insufficient documentation. |
| ✅ Relay | Relay is a Ci/CD pipeline automation platform primarily focused on cloud operations. It is powered by Puppet, a DevOps technology pioneer, and provides CI/CD developers with straightforward solutions for automating cloud-based operations. | Pricing for Relay starts at $20 per user per month. | Relay has an excellent library of ready-to-use integrations, event-based triggers, and automation recipes or steps that can help you get started with minimal effort. However, support for on-premise environments is limited. |
Summary
Through the benefits of pipeline, many software teams implement this process, especially the process of Ci/CD pipeline tools in DevOps activities. The specific and efficient features that CI/CD pipeline tools in DevOps bring are making a trend of using DevOps pipeline devices in software development today.
