Automated pipelines have accelerated deployments and dashboards now reveal clear pricing and security gaps
What is our primary use case?
The main use case for
CircleCI is to have build pipelines and to execute the pipelines, tests, and deployments while using it to get results and obtain a dashboard.
For a specific example of how I use CircleCI for deployments in my projects, I utilize it for continuous integration and automation to have the builds. I create YAML pipelines with it, and we first have some steps such as installing Node if it is a front-end build or installing the dependencies. After that, I build the project. Following the build, I deploy it on AWS Elastic Container Service of the image. After the image is deployed, I deploy that image on the running EC2, either in EC2 or within the S3 bucket. Then, the environment is ready, and I run the tests against that environment.
Additionally, I use CircleCI for insights and dashboards, doing some dashboarding and monitoring the results, duration, and how the runs have been, including the output and generation of reports or sending notifications to email addresses. I also connect it with Azure DevOps and GitHub.
What is most valuable?
I think the best features CircleCI offers are continuous integration and deployment, automation, parallel testing, and infrastructure as code, enabling the use of
Terraform and
Docker scripts, which it can run. It also provides security and compliance through security scans, linting, and compliance checks. These are key features that it offers.
Among those features, I find the most valuable in my day-to-day work the automation aspect, as we have a large product team with many developers who continuously create branches and push code, necessitating automation that builds the pipeline and the branches automatically while giving faster feedback. There is speed, flexibility, and intelligent pipeline orchestration possible with CircleCI, which we appreciate. Additionally, we have hooks and can run tasks on commit or push, which allows executions based on those events, and the self-hosted runners to run jobs on our infrastructure or use provided agents by CircleCI itself are also beneficial.
CircleCI has positively impacted my organization by bringing in faster deployments, which means we can release faster, receive quicker feedback, and enhance collaboration and communication across the entire team. We benefit from really good dashboards, build performance analytics, and optimization of resources, which allows for multiple containers or virtual machines, significantly reducing build time. Additionally, the security and vulnerability scanning provided out of the box helps tremendously, as we just need to push the code and everything is managed by our CircleCI YAML scripts.
What needs improvement?
I think CircleCI can improve in terms of pricing and needs to bring more unique selling points to stay competitive as there are many other cloud solutions such as
GitHub Actions and
Azure DevOps that offer similar execution and deployment services.
I believe CircleCI should leverage the growing trend of AI by offering an out-of-the-box AI-driven dynamic YAML file creation feature using natural language processing. Instead of having users define pipelines manually, users could simply use natural language to define their needs and let the AI generate the YAML configuration automatically. Implementing a multi-agent architecture could also enhance usability.
I rated CircleCI six out of ten because I think they need more transparency in pricing, as there are instances of unclear network data transfer and storage costs related to caching and workspaces. Additionally, there are sporadic platform security incidents that need addressing, and pipelines require good protection. Secret rotation should also be prioritized. There are occasionally long-running workflows that can be difficult to debug, and improvements could be made in job startup times and cache management.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using CircleCI for the last five years.
How was the initial setup?
The most challenging aspect during the initial setup of CircleCI in my organization was understanding how to create and implement our pipelines effectively. Although there is good documentation, determining the importance of various components for building and deploying from CircleCI to our
AWS infrastructure to achieve faster deployments and feedback was initially not straightforward.
What other advice do I have?
I really appreciate the good speed, which is faster and definitely the most important feature for me.
To ensure that security and compliance requirements are met while using CircleCI, we utilize restricted contexts for secrets along with short-lived credentials. We follow some regulatory guidelines, ensuring that every job runs in an isolated environment, either in a Docker container or a virtual machine. Furthermore, we maintain secret rotation and use secure API tokens while implementing appropriate access controls.
I rate this product six out of ten.
Automated deployments have streamlined cloud releases but configuration orbs still need simplification
What is our primary use case?
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.
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?
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?
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)
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.
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.
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.
