Automated deployments have saved time and now streamline code delivery with instant feedback
What is our primary use case?
I have used CircleCI for my organization's website to build an automation pipeline for deploying our code from GitHub to our environment.
We integrated our environment variables into CircleCI, which get injected into our code. Whenever there is a new commit into our main branch, it triggers an action which CircleCI listens to. CircleCI builds our application in the background, injecting the environment variables which we have provided. After the bundle is created successfully, it deploys to an AWS EC2 instance. If there is a failure, it sends a notification to our Slack.
What is most valuable?
Automation and continuous integration is one of the best aspects I appreciate. The development process is smooth in terms of its integration. CircleCI can integrate with GitHub, Bitbucket, and other repositories, which makes it incredibly powerful and an amazing tool to work with.
Previously, we had the entire pipeline using a manual process. Whenever there was a deployment, we had to call our DevOps team to trigger and deploy the build and verify it. If there was a failure, we were notified manually. Now everything has been automated from the code in our repository to the environment. If there are any issues or successes, we get notifications to Slack, which is remarkable.
It saves a lot of time and works fast once the setup is done. The pipeline is created once and then it is available indefinitely unless specific modifications are needed. We receive notifications quickly regarding the previous build status, logs, and what failed or succeeded. This completely eliminates the manual effort of deploying our application from our GitHub repository to the EC2 instance on AWS.
What needs improvement?
As each time code is deployed onto the main branch, the build automatically triggers, saving us time. We have reduced our manual efforts significantly after the initial setup. We used to spend around four to five hours per week managing deployments and related processes, which has been reduced substantially.
CircleCI is fairly simple to use and set up. Sometimes the documentation is too in-depth. There are many features, but I think sharing the top ones would help end users set it up more quickly and efficiently. Simpler documentation and implementation highlighting the top features instead of presenting a huge bulk of information would make the experience perfect.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using CircleCI for the last two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
CircleCI is very stable and performs amazingly fast.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
CircleCI is great in terms of scalability. It can integrate with multiple platforms and also with many multiple notification systems.
How are customer service and support?
Customer support is amazing. Whenever we have had issues with initial setup or questions, both the customer support and technical support teams have been excellent.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We used Jenkins earlier and it seemed difficult in terms of integration. The UI was outdated. We had to switch from older systems to new ones, and CircleCI emerged as one of the best options to integrate.
CircleCI was recommended and we knew it was effective. Jenkins is what we switched from.
How was the initial setup?
CircleCI is fairly simple to use and set up.
What about the implementation team?
I did not directly interact with all those processes, but from what I hear from the team and the sales team, the implementation has been smooth. CircleCI is very cost-effective, so it was a great choice.
What was our ROI?
Time has certainly been saved in terms of reducing the manual effort of building and deploying. Regarding money, CircleCI came at a lower price than the products we had earlier. However, I do not have specific metrics because the sales team and purchase team handled that matter. As a developer, I did not go through the licensing and purchasing process.
What other advice do I have?
CircleCI is an amazing tool. It is fast, modern, and integrates with most systems, whether repositories or notification systems.
CircleCI is a very powerful tool and you should at least try it once to see how powerful, amazing, and fast it is.
I believe CircleCI is one of the best platforms in its category due to how amazing, fast, and scalable it is.
This review process represents one of the most modern technical ways of gathering feedback. I gave this product a rating of nine out of ten.
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?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Automated onboarding and multi-stage pipelines have reduced deployment time and manual effort
What is our primary use case?
My main use case for CircleCI is creating a pipeline for continuous integration and continuous delivery, which is a CI/CD pipeline.
A specific example of how I use CircleCI for my pipelines is deploying infrastructures and applications for customers. I have also completed one integration project using CircleCI where I automated the customer onboarding process to remove manual effort.
What is most valuable?
In my opinion, the best features CircleCI offers include integrations with different tools such as GitHub and other version control tools, the ability to write or integrate your code with different platforms, the option to write your own testing, and the capability to create multi-staging pipelines and single-stage pipelines with jobs.
CircleCI's integration with GitHub and other platforms has helped my workflow by allowing me to integrate with CircleCI if my code is on GitHub or on different version control tools such as AWS GitHub or AWS version control tools. With the multi-stage pipeline, I can run my pipeline in a parallel manner, and for custom jobs, I can create and run ad-hoc jobs.
The multi-stage pipeline, custom job pipeline, and the integration with GitHub stand out most to me.
CircleCI has impacted my organization positively by removing most of our manual effort and human effort, increasing speed, and removing human error, which has improved our workflow, speed, and efficiency.
What needs improvement?
CircleCI can be improved with more integrations with different cloud platforms and by providing environment security features.
It could provide integration for secrets with Vault or other security tools.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using CircleCI for one year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
In my experience, CircleCI is stable, but it can be improved.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
CircleCI's scalability is increasing and growing well with our workloads.
How are customer service and support?
I have not contacted customer support so far because we have not needed to.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Before, I was using Jenkins to see how it would perform, but CircleCI is more user-friendly and provides better structure and collaboration, which is why we chose CircleCI.
CircleCI compares favorably to other CI/CD tools I have used before, such as Jenkins or GitLab CI. Those tools are not as user-friendly, whereas CircleCI is user-friendly, good to use, and easy to use.
How was the initial setup?
The learning curve for CircleCI was easy because it is user-friendly.
What was our ROI?
I have seen a return on investment as fewer employees are needed, and our time is saved.
Before we were using CircleCI, deploying and setting up architecture or deploying an application for our customers took one or two days, but using CircleCI, it only takes around half a day, so it has improved significantly.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that we are currently using the trial version and are considering purchasing another level of CircleCI, focusing on which tier would be best for our setup.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing CircleCI, I evaluated other options including Jenkins. CircleCI is a good solution, and after evaluating other internal options, we chose to use CircleCI.
What other advice do I have?
My advice to others looking into using CircleCI is to use it if you want to collaborate with multiple teams and prefer structured, user-friendly solutions with more integrations with tools. CircleCI is a perfect solution for multi-staging and jobs. Regarding compliance or regulatory requirements in my organization, we are not currently focusing on that area, so I am not aware of those concerns. I would rate CircleCI an eight out of ten overall.
Automation has improved delivery speed and supports complex microservice pipelines
What is our primary use case?
My main use cases for CircleCI include automated testing, CI, continuous development, mobile app development, microservices orchestrations, and DevSecOps use cases.
We use CircleCI to build and deploy microservices on Kubernetes and OpenShift platforms, where we run unit tests, integration tests, and linting on every commit as part of our CI process. We also use it for continuous deployment, automating the deployment to different platforms such as AWS, GCP, Azure, as well as Kubernetes clusters.
For our primary use case with CircleCI, we handle complex pipelines with multiple repositories and dependencies in microservice orchestrations.
What is most valuable?
The best features CircleCI offers are its ease of use, YAML-based configuration, maintenance-free operation as a software as a service platform, and good speed.
The YAML configuration and maintenance-free setup in CircleCI help me daily because it uses a very straightforward YAML-based configuration, allowing us not to worry about other programming languages, and it has a very low entry barrier, making it helpful for all developers.
CircleCI helps with faster time to market and improved productivity by automating testing and deployments, which allows for frequent and reliable software releases and application deployments. From a developer productivity point of view, developers spend much less time on build troubleshooting and more time writing code due to its very simple YAML language, which is a human-readable language.
CircleCI has positively impacted my organization with faster time to market, improved software quality, cost efficiency, and increased developer productivity.
What needs improvement?
To improve CircleCI, I think some layers of optimized caching need to be implemented, it can monitor credit usage, and use insights for improvement to increase value.
I chose an 8.5 for my rating because there are still many areas that need to be increased and improved, such as leveraging orbs and replacing custom, complex scripts with pre-built, community-verified orbs to reduce maintenance overhead.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using CircleCI for the last four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
From a scalability point of view, CircleCI allows us to easily configure active and passive clusters, making it very good in terms of scalability.
How are customer service and support?
Customer support for CircleCI is very good.
What was our ROI?
I have seen a return on investment with CircleCI, as it saves money and time, requires fewer employees because it automates deployments easily, and enables us to complete all development tasks in much less time with limited employees.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
My experience with CircleCI's pricing, setup cost, and licensing is very good.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We use CircleCI from scratch, but side-by-side we are also using Jenkins and Argo CD.
What other advice do I have?
My advice for others looking into using CircleCI is that if anyone is using it for their CI/CD needs and wants good performance, they should definitely use CircleCI. I gave this product a rating of 8.5 based on my overall experience.
Automated container builds have accelerated our Go deployments and simplified AWS workflows
What is our primary use case?
My main use case for CircleCI involves different CI capabilities, mostly building containers and general applications. I use CircleCI for building containers and applications, specifically for our GoLang application. We have an ECS application written in GoLang which runs scans against the infrastructure. Regardless, it is completely built and managed. The configs are also stored in Bitbucket, and CircleCI is connected to it, running all the builds, processes, and deployment in the end to the ECS.
What is most valuable?
The best features CircleCI offers are probably the modules, which have great extendability. I use the modules or extendability in CircleCI primarily for classic pushes to AWS, and those include registry sign-ons and other cases.
CircleCI has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to build quicker and do things quicker. It does the job really well. These extensions are called Workflows. I have used some AWS Workflows, and there are multiple others.
CircleCI helps you build and do things quicker. It is difficult to say if there were specific improvements, but there is general reliability and probably improvements overall.
What needs improvement?
I have no idea how CircleCI can be improved. I am a user, not a developer of CI tools. I do not really have anything to add about the needed improvements, even small things that could make my experience better.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using CircleCI for around a year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
CircleCI's scalability is great. I have never had any problems with it.
How are customer service and support?
I did not deal with CircleCI's customer support.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I previously used multiple solutions. The very first one was GitLab, but it was just an experiment, because there are quite a few limitations that we had with GitLab, so we had to switch.
What was our ROI?
I cannot say if I have seen a return on investment. It is very difficult to tell.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that I only used CircleCI on the free tier.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing CircleCI, I evaluated other options, specifically Jenkins.
What other advice do I have?
My advice for others looking into using CircleCI is to read more documentation. The documentation is really good. I would rate this review an 8.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Fast, User-Friendly, but Keep an Eye on Costs
What do you like best about the product?
I find CircleCI easy to use and integrate. The servers are pretty fast, which is a major plus. The initial setup was simple, and it just works.
What do you dislike about the product?
It may be not that cheap if your compilation is not optimized enough.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I use CircleCI for compiling, testing, and deploying applications on the server. It's easy to use and integrates well, with faster servers than GitHub Actions.
Very very good tool easy to login from github
What do you like best about the product?
Very very good tool easy to login from github
What do you dislike about the product?
Nothing as of now. Looking forward for more
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Very very good tool easy to login from github. But as of now no problem
Solid Tool for easy CI
What do you like best about the product?
Integrations are great. Configuration was easy and has a solid number of features. We use this in our CI for a handful of apps and it's very easy to use.
What do you dislike about the product?
Wish it had better integrations for mobile apps (android / iOS) alternatives have easy integrations into those developer platforms to pull certificates etc.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Not running deploys locally. Centralization of environment variables
It is a great platform to coordinate your CI/CD
What do you like best about the product?
It is really easy to integrate with GitHub and Gitlab. On the other hand I really like that my team can easily take advantage of the platform to understand the problems that may occur with the pipelines, is really easy to identify the problem by checking logs and identify the step that is failing.
What do you dislike about the product?
The pricing page is a little bit confusing for me. But maybe this is just me because I'm not using this section very regularly, however when i enter I always forgot how to do the report I need and the UI is not very intuitive
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We have the CI/CD pipelines inside CircleCI for the 2 main products in the company. A mobile application and the backend API that is used by all the clients inside our system. The benefit of having the pipelines here is that engineers can easily understand problems with deployments without the help from the DevOps team. They can easily understand the issues and fixing by themselves most of the cases
A review of CircleCi
What do you like best about the product?
The Continious integration server is operating mainly online through Single sign on to Github or E-mail authentication. I shall confess that the integration server is fast. It was built to speed up releases. Besides, all those features, their cloud plans enpower their solution.
What do you dislike about the product?
I hope their customer support team will focus on customer success and satisfaction to include the customer feedback in their upcoming horizons.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
CircleCi sorts out the speed matter. It is faster than other solutions and was developed to get rid off this problem.
Besides, the solution is innovative. From ideas, reach concrete solutions and make them better through automation.
Also, It is a viable solution which is user friendly through the configuration of yaml files.
CircleCI is one of the best continuous integration and continuous delivery platform
What do you like best about the product?
CircleCI is easy to set up and manage.
You can easily create projects in CircleCI and configure config.yml to define your CI pipeline.
We have set up multiple projects in CircleCI, and CI pipelines are working fine.
CircleCI also gives an option to setup a self-hosted runner where you are not dependent on Circle CI backend infra to run your pipelines.
What do you dislike about the product?
Sometimes CI pipelines may fail if they run on Circle CI infra due to unavailability or high load.
We ran multiple CI/CD pipelines in Circle CI and did not see many issues.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We have set up multiple projects in CircleCI, and CI pipelines are working fine.
We have also set up self-hosted runners in Circle CI which is helping us to use our own infra to run pipelines.
CircleCI is easy to setup and manage.
