Automated CI/CD pipelines have transformed deployment speed and collaboration for my teams
What is our primary use case?
I have been using CircleCI for over three years as part of my DevOps toolchain.
I use CircleCI to automate CI/CD pipelines, including build, test, and deployment workflows across multiple applications. In one pipeline, I deploy an application to my Kubernetes cluster on AWS in the cloud, and I use CircleCI to automate that deployment in the form of a pipeline.
CircleCI is helping me automate my deployment workflows effectively, and it is a fit use case for the same. I have been using it for many application deployments, and it is working for end-to-end deployment.
What is most valuable?
CircleCI offers fast parallel builds, easy integration with GitHub, and the ability to deploy applications on Kubernetes pods, which are amazing features.
Fast parallel builds and GitHub integration have definitely helped my team reach faster time to market for our applications. Previously, our deployment used to take a couple of hours when doing it manually, but with CircleCI pipeline, our hours-long job has been converted to a couple of minutes.
Its simplicity, fast pipeline execution, and strong GitHub and GitLab integrations are definitely unique advantages I discovered while using CircleCI.
Time saved is one of the key aspects I have seen since using CircleCI. I have noticed fewer deployment errors, and it has helped me with easy debugging. Time saved is directly proportional to the cost and effort saved.
CircleCI has positively impacted my organization by integrating directly with my Git repositories as a fully managed SaaS platform.
CircleCI has a great impact on my team's collaboration and communication, with around 25 to 40 developers and DevOps engineers using it daily across multiple repositories and environments, helping us use it at scale.
CircleCI has significantly increased our release frequency and deployment speed compared to before I started using it.
CircleCI improves security for my organization by enforcing automated checks in the pipeline and securely managing secrets through environment variables while providing auditable deployments.
CircleCI integrates seamlessly with my DevOps toolchain by connecting directly to GitHub, container registries, and my cloud platform AWS, allowing the entire CI/CD flow from code commit to deployment and monitoring with minimal manual effort.
What needs improvement?
I believe debugging complex pipelines and managing credits can sometimes be challenging, especially for large workflows, so these areas can be improved.
The user interface can definitely be improved to debug complex pipelines. I would benefit from better AI-generated insights where I can debug the pipelines easily without going through detailed logging.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working in my current field for more than 10 years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
CircleCI has been very stable in my experience with consistent pipeline executions and minimal platform-related issues.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
CircleCI scales well as my team and repositories grow, allowing me to run multiple concurrent pipelines without performance degradation.
I have not encountered any limitations with CircleCI's scalability as my projects have grown. However, managing pipeline complexity and optimizing credits usage required additional planning, which was manageable.
How are customer service and support?
CircleCI team has been responsive and knowledgeable whenever I sought assistance.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Previously, I used Jenkins but moved to CircleCI to reduce maintenance overhead and simplify pipeline management, as CircleCI provided faster setup, better scalability, and a more streamlined developer experience.
How was the initial setup?
CircleCI documentation is generally clear and well-structured, making it easy to get started and implement standard CI/CD workflows.
What was our ROI?
CircleCI has significantly reduced build and deployment times, saving substantial engineering hours and effort for me, which has directly improved my productivity and release velocity, reflecting incredible ROI.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
My experience with CircleCI's pricing model is quite straightforward with no upfront setup cost, and the licensing is flexible based on my usage. Costs can increase as pipeline usage scales, but they remain predictable and manageable with proper monitoring.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing CircleCI, I evaluated Jenkins, GitHub Actions, and GitLab CI/CD. CircleCI stood out due to its ease of use, faster execution, and lower operational overhead.
What other advice do I have?
CircleCI has been a reliable and efficient platform for me that has helped streamline my delivery process and CI/CD process. With continued enhancements around cost visibility and advanced pipeline management, it can deliver even greater value.
My advice for others looking into using CircleCI is to invest time in pipeline design and cost monitoring early to get the best long-term value from the platform. CircleCI would be a strong choice for those who want fast, reliable CI/CD with minimal operational overhead.
I would rate this review an 8 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?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
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.
A good CI/CD tool
What do you like best about the product?
The best thing is the ability to re-start a test step wtih SSH and see what failed, mess around the pod to fix it, and then commit on your local machine.
What do you dislike about the product?
It is expensive. There are various plans, but the cost was too great for us.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It is a CI/CD tool, that's what it does.
CircleCI Integration: Review and Implementation
What do you like best about the product?
Its seamless integration with popular version control systems like GitHub and Bitbucket. This allows developers to quickly set up and configure continuous integration and delivery pipelines for their projects.CircleCI also provides excellent scalability and performance, allowing for efficient parallel execution of tests and builds. Overall, CircleCI offers a reliable and robust CI/CD solution that dramatically simplifies the process of automating software builds, tests, and deployments.
What do you dislike about the product?
CircleCI primarily focuses on cloud-based CI/CD workflows, which may not align well with specific local development or on-premises deployment scenarios. This can be a limitation for organizations with specific requirements.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Automation of Build and Test Processes,
Continuous Integration,
Scalability and Parallelism,
Multi-platform and Multi-language Support,
Visibility and Monitoring
Good product, full functionalities
What do you like best about the product?
Good integration
Easy to use
Nice UI, user friendly
What do you dislike about the product?
The ORB programming is hard to understand
needs more tutorials & documentation
Need good community support for new functionality
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
CI as a service
Circle CI as an pre code review check
What do you like best about the product?
We use CircleCI as a pre-check on commits, before doing the actual code review, integrated to phabricator. As our codebase grows, running lint checkers and tests locally before opening a code review takes a long time, so we usually do not do it locally and leave it to the CI, trading our time in running automatic checks for focusing on other tasks. It also help us locate adjusts to our commits before the actual code review, the CI will indicate and error on the commit and not send it to the next step, peer review.
What do you dislike about the product?
I am not in charge of configuration and maintenance of the CI on my company, but sometimes we have problems where the automation stops working, sometimes it would run the tests we delegated to it but not make a post-test change on the commit status (would not change it to ready to review)
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
In my company, we use CI in two moments. First, running tests and linter on code reviews, before making it reviewable to peers and once it hits the master branch, to check if everything is ok even after the rebase.
First use guarantee us that we will be reviewing a commit that already had some checks ran on it, that means if that commit broke something else on the code, and it is covered by test, of course, we will be able to notice it and work on adjusts before an actual peer reviews it.
The second use makes sure that, once the commit is approved and then sent to master, the rebase/merge with master branch did not break anything in the project. It is important to us since we have different teams working on different parts of the product, and sometimes they share components, resources or need to adjust something in the whole product.
