What do you like best about the product?

We run a fairly complex flow that takes every new commit, runs the tests for it, builds the app then uploads it to App Store Connect. Since we're pushing several builds per day, it easily saves us at least 2 man-hours each day. It's very easy to set up, easy to customise to your own specific build pipeline and integrates well with other tools to send notifications when things go wrong.

What do you dislike about the product?

Nothing major, really. The UI could be better, but to be honest, you won't spend much time in the UI once everything is set up.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

The build process for a mobile app gets longer and longer these days, so CircleCI helped us automate most of the process, saving us plenty of time every day (we push multiple builds daily).

Recommendations to others considering the product:

I highly recommend implementing CircleCI as your CI backbone. You'll thank yourself.

What do you like best about the product?

CircleCI provides quite a nice declarative interface for CI/CD pipelines. We use CircleCI for everything from application code CI/CD to deployment of our infrastructure via Terraform, to pushing Kubernetes manifests for K8s resources. The integration with GitHub is nice, and the support for GitHub releases is a very nice feature.

I think the real power of CircleCI is that application teams are able to completely own their own pipelines. By storing configuration along with the application code developers are able to own their pathway to production using reproducible configuration.

What do you dislike about the product?

We use CircleCI Server running in AWS. I think the biggest problem we have is that the server version is quite far behind in feature set compared to the SaaS version. With no support for version 2.1 configuration, and by extension features such as parameterised commands and jobs, and orbs. This is really disappointing, because it makes it hard to utilise CircleCI to its full extent.

The other primary issues we have with CircleCI are:

- The interface is seriously lacking. The workflow view doesn't scale well with large workflows, making it annoying to use when a pipeline has more than half a dozen sequential jobs.

- The API is poor. It has limited support for programmatically managing workflow operation, and generally displays rather poor design. Not supporting the ability to retrieve a specific number of objects (e.g. "Return me the first 55 projects that I don't follow"), inconsistencies with returned fields (e.g. Followed projects from the /projects endpoint return "reponame" and "followed" fields, whereas /user/repos returns "name" and "following" fields.), inconsistent use of pagination, etc.

- Configuration in a single file. This can be worked around by using the CircleCI CLI with the `config pack` command, but it would be nice to see support for spreading config across multiple files without having to include this additional, manual, step.

- Can't reference configuration within another repo (see ConcourseCI). It would be nice if we could have a repo dedicated to small, reusable CircleCI config files that can simply be referenced via the GitHub URL (with support for parameters). I know Orbs is meant to solve this issue, but right now server users don't have access to the orbs feature, and there is no support for private orbs.

- Triggers are rather arbitrary. Currently the only way to kick off a workflow is either manually, or via a PR/commit. Additional triggers, such as "PR merged" would be very useful, as this would allow us to more easily spin up and destroy PR specific temp environments.

- Can't default the resource class across all jobs in CircleCI Server.

- Can't trigger a job on the condition that a previous job failed (this would be useful for cleanup scenarios, such as a terraform apply failing halfway through applying).

- Can't run CircleCI Server on Kubernetes, have to use Nomad. This means we have to manage a separate orchestration cluster for CircleCI, rather than being able to utilise our Kubernetes expertise.

- Metrics are kinda garbage on CircleCI Server. No obvious way for gathering metrics of remote docker instances. Metrics have to be gathered mostly from Nomad, rather than CircleCI providing these metrics (e.g. Deployment metrics, build metrics like build times/job times, etc).

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

- Kubernetes resource deployments (e.g. control-plane, operators, etc.)
- Application releases via Helm.
- Terraform automation.
- Cron style task that run on schedule.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Only use CircleCI Server if you really have to as it takes key features from the product.

What do you like best about the product?

Easy to share configuration via workflows, contexts, orbs.

Very good Docker support

What do you dislike about the product?

Web UI hierarchy of jobs vs workflows is confusing to me

It's not easy to report on jobs at an organization-wide level

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Our main workload is building .NET Core applications and deploying via CloudFormation. This includes spinning up complex end-to-end automated test suites involving multiple Docker containers.

What do you like best about the product?

The simplicity with which I can automate the build, testing, and deployment workflow in a few very short-time.

What do you dislike about the product?

It doesn't support manually trigger builds.
Available metrics are a bit poor.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It has been helpful to automate the build, testing, and deployment process quickly in many projects. We can focus on app configuration files without having to worry about infrastructure setup and maintenance on the CI server side.

What do you like best about the product?

The continuous deployment process with circle CI is easy to setup with GitHub . You can have the different pipelines configured for production and staging environments and circle manages them without any trouble .

What do you dislike about the product?

Need to manually change the configs whenever I update my dev environment like tool version change or coco pods version change or fast lane version change. If it can automatically update its configs based on my project settings, that would be awesome. This is the only issue I have at the moment.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It really saves lot of dev time in sending out the builds. You could save an hour a day minimum with this. Especially if you were to send multiple builds every day for testing, this should be your saviour.

What do you like best about the product?

The layout of the website, and log in integration with GitHub.

What do you dislike about the product?

The number of emails I receive from the company.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Basic QA and bug statuses are easy to track, and I can easily monitor the progress being made by other engineers

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Do it!

What do you like best about the product?

I think what I like the most is the support for so many different systems and configurations that CircleCI is essentially your one-stop-shop for CI.

This is especially useful in cross-platform projects like many of the ones I work with.

What do you dislike about the product?

Every so often, CI just seems stalled out and can takes a while to recover.
Not unlike any other alternative, but it’s an annoyance nonetheless.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Testing Code for Linux, macOS, Windows, Arduino, and more.
Embedded is especially difficult to maintain, and CircleCI makes things significantly less painful.

What do you like best about the product?

Great support! Instant feedback! Great integrations with other services as well. CircleCI is tightly integrated with our deployment and testing workflows and we are completely satisfied with the product!

What do you dislike about the product?

The UI is a little hard to use - I wish the user experience was a little better. The colors, fonts, styling could be better when compared to other comparable tools. It's hard to find the right build I'm looking for - some searching, tagging, favoriting features would be good to have!

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Continuous integration to run tests on all branches and continuous deployment.

What do you like best about the product?

it plugs and plays with github repos very easily.

What do you dislike about the product?

sometimes it's hard to see the connection between your config files and the UI

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Learning how to research the answers to questions I have. Like - how do you have separate workflow per branch.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Get started easily by connecting to your github account

What do you like best about the product?

It's very responsive and detailed in reporting errors

What do you dislike about the product?

Sometimes it gets stuck and not able to process PRs.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

easy integration and offer detailed information