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What Is CircleCI?

CircleCI is the worlds largest shared continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, and the central hub where code moves from idea to delivery. As one of the most-used DevOps tools that processes more than 1 million builds a day, CircleCI has unique access to data on how engineering teams work, and how their code runs. Companies like Spotify, Coinbase, Stitch Fix, and BuzzFeed use us to improve engineering team productivity, release better products, and get to market faster.

Who Uses CircleCI?

Thousands of leading companies from startups to Fortune 10's including Kickstarter, Facebook, Spotify and Heroku trust CircleCI to automate their testing and development cycle.

CircleCI Software - CircleCI Insights
CircleCI Software - CircleCI for OS X
CircleCI Software - CircleCI Enterprise
CircleCI Software - CircleCI Insights
CircleCI Software - Build Page

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Reviews of CircleCI

Average score

Overall
4.6
Ease of Use
4.3
Customer Service
4.4
Features
4.5
Value for Money
4.2

Reviews by company size (employees)

  • <50
  • 51-200
  • 201-1,000
  • >1,001

Find reviews by score

5
58%
4
40%
3
2%
Dylan
Dylan
Software Developer in UK
Verified LinkedIn User
Computer Software, 11–50 Employees
Used the Software for: 1-5 months
Reviewer Source

A very capable CI system with a lot of quality of life features

5.0 11 months ago

Pros:

CircleCI is very fast, reliable, and has a very slick UI. I like how easily it integrated with our version control system and how simply we could build useful automations into our pipeline.

Cons:

Although it has a decent free offering, as with most CI's, CircleCI's pricing scales quite quickly once you leave the free tier.

Ricardo
Team Lead in Argentina
Information Technology & Services, 201–500 Employees
Used the Software for: 2+ years
Reviewer Source

Simple and strong software

5.0 last month New

Comments: Really good, is one of the small things on the pipelines and projects, that when it uses other solution, I miss the simplicity that circleci provides

Pros:

I like that is really easy to use, for multiple platforms, easy solutions, good support lot of info, and if you know simple bash commands is really easy to build your own pipeline

Cons:

Sometimes the UI is not perfect, but their are updating it and lastly it improved a lot

Carey
Carey
Chief Information Security Officer in US
Verified LinkedIn User
Internet, 10,000+ Employees
Used the Software for: 6-12 months
Reviewer Source

Easy-to-use UI and features for configuring the CI

3.0 3 years ago

Comments: We deploy in the form of a circle. Since it was already in place when I began working here, I can't speak to how things were before, but I can say that it makes things much simpler for newcomers to the organization.

Pros:

Excellent customer service, and now even faster builds Workflows 2.0 makes it simple for me to parallelize tasks. Simple integration with code-quality services like GitHub. If necessary, it can be built on macOS.

Cons:

Nothing of significance to point out. It's a little messy with reduced resolutions if we go to a project and filter it by Branch Name. On a mobile device or a browser tab, for example. Except for that, everything else is fine.

Verified Reviewer
Verified LinkedIn User
Financial Services, 51–200 Employees
Used the Software for: 6-12 months
Reviewer Source

Alternatives Considered:

Simple & efficient CI

4.0 2 years ago

Comments: Migrations was easy and straightforward. It works well. We were a bit startled because of the security issue they faced and we had to renew all of the secrets which was painful. Apart from that incident, we're happy. It's never been down for us (as opposed to Github).

Pros:

The setup of pipelines is very easy, especially with the orbs. Each pipeline is always code, so it's automatically versioned. We moved away from CodePipelines from AWS because it was too click-intensive.

Cons:

The permissions are simple: everything is copied from GitHub in our case. What seems at first convenient ends up quite confusing. And it's easy to get lost with security contexts. It would have been nice to be able to see who can perform what action from the Circle CI UI itself.

Verified Reviewer
Verified LinkedIn User
Banking, 51–200 Employees
Used the Software for: 2+ years
Reviewer Source

Alternatives Considered:

CircleCI - For Simple, Easy & feature rich CI/CD

5.0 2 years ago

Comments: Overall I love CircleCI UI, ease of deployment & it is feature rich. Availability & execution parameterization can be improved.

Pros:

Best part of circleCI is the ease of continuous delivery feature it offers, it's very easy to integrate it with GitHub too. Another pro of CircleCI over other CI/CD tool like Jenkins is the simple yet feature rich UI. For beginners or pros, this workflow management tool is pretty simple yet futuristic. It also makes running automated test cases for different branches really easy before deployment.

Cons:

There is room for improvement in areas where Jenkins is already winning, like skipping parts of execution stages that are not required every time new change is pushed. Another one would be the execution time, using it with terraform to run plans & eventually apply, it can take hours if your infrastructure is complex & there is no way to actually divide it in stages. Better central monitoring & dashboard for different projects can be helpful, somewhat like Jenkins shows rainy, cloudy or clear skies signifying project health.

Verified Reviewer
Verified LinkedIn User
Computer Software, 5,001–10,000 Employees
Used the Software for: 1+ year
Reviewer Source

One of the top CI/CD service

5.0 3 years ago

Pros:

With a Github/Bitbucket account, it is easy to setup the CircleCI account. It automatically detects all the repositories. We can easily add the configuration file and start using the pipelines. Various customisation and parallelisation options are provided. Lot of possibilities for automation and customisation. Overall a good product.

Cons:

It was bit of a hassle to start first, the configuration were not very easy. Also struggled a bit to manage various Github organisations. Once easy and setup, it's easy and fast.

Tahmidul
CTO in UK
E-Learning, 2–10 Employees
Used the Software for: 1+ year
Reviewer Source

Alternatives Considered:

Great once you're all set up

4.0 4 years ago

Pros:

- Easy to understand yaml config format - Integration with GitHub - Workflows for powerful deployment and release strategies - Good community support

Cons:

- I am not the biggest fan of the recent UI update. If the "expand" toggle is set to true, everything jumps resulting in me clicking things unintentionally. - Many of us have workflows that we do not use on every push (e.g. deploying to testing). With the next UI changes, the UI has a timer column which is always updating, why??? - Why can't I select a default project? When I now browse to circleci, I always have to select a project. Most developers only ever work on one project at a time, let us choose one!

Ogaga
Security Analyst in US
Health, Wellness & Fitness, 51–200 Employees
Used the Software for: 1+ year
Reviewer Source

Alternatives Considered:

Continuous Integration and Deployment made easy

5.0 3 years ago

Pros:

It's easy to integrate most of the industry products with CircleCI, including tools used for Quality and Security. You only need some level of programming to get through the integration process. It works well for our model and we do not need the full DevOps suite to use Circle CI

Cons:

There is nothing to dislike about this product.

Manon
Associate software engineer in UK
Computer Software, 5,001–10,000 Employees
Used the Software for: 1+ year
Reviewer Source

Seamless Continuous Integration

5.0 4 months ago

Pros:

It's automation for testing and deployment is fantastic. It saved me a lot of time by running tests automatically after every code push.

Cons:

It took me a while to get my build scripts working correctly the first time.

Luis Carlos
Luis Carlos
Data Analyst in Guatemala
Verified LinkedIn User
Computer Software, 11–50 Employees
Used the Software for: 2+ years
Reviewer Source

Alternatives Considered:

Good for CI/CD and also for automating smaller tasks

5.0 3 years ago

Comments: We use CircleCI for our CI/CD pipeline almost every single day. It manages and runs automated tests for all the remote branches, so we can catch issues before they escalate. When ever something gets merged into our dev, staging or master branches, it auto tests, builds and deploy all the infrastructure with Terraform and pushes the newer version to docker.

Pros:

The pipelines can be broken into different steps, which makes debugging, managing and approving individual phases way easier. Also, looking at the logs and being able to share static permalinks to them is quite useful when you have larger teams. We all can see the progress of the building pipelines in real time and can debug and manage them. Great tool over all.

Cons:

Sometimes it fails and doesn't immediately let's you go to debug the issue. Also, some settings for the VMs are tricky to set up right.

Nikhil Kumar
Software Engineer in India
Computer Software, 501–1,000 Employees
Used the Software for: 2+ years
Reviewer Source

Simple and inexpensive tool for CI/CD.

5.0 2 years ago

Pros:

It's inexpensiveness is the main attraction but also along with that CircleCi provides tons of other helpful features as well you can share the test logs via email as well.

Cons:

As for my use case I don't have anything to dislike and it is ideal for me.

Yash
Student in India
Computer Software, Self Employed
Used the Software for: Free Trial
Reviewer Source

A great CI/CD platform for software development.

4.0 2 years ago

Comments: Awesome experience with CircleCI

Pros:

CircleCI provides a significant benefit in its user-friendly nature and straightforwardness, allowing developers to easily create, manage, and tailor their workflows through a simplified and intuitive interface that is effortless to set up and use.

Cons:

Great software overall, liked the ease of use.

Chippy
Software Developer in Australia
Airlines/Aviation, 201–500 Employees
Used the Software for: 6-12 months
Reviewer Source

CircleCI for Easy deployment and Testing

4.0 2 years ago

Comments: It’s simple with an automated build feature.

Pros:

It’s test driven environment makes development and testing much easier. Integration is also easy with just one config file.

Cons:

On free plan, the options available are very less when compared to other alternatives.

Verified Reviewer
Verified LinkedIn User
Hospitality, 11–50 Employees
Used the Software for: 2+ years
Reviewer Source

Circle CI trusted by FB

4.0 6 years ago

Pros:

Circle CI is being trusted by FB for React, and Fastlane. So if it works for them I think that is a great testament to it.

Cons:

Doesn't allow as many languages and environments out of the box as Travis CI does.

Verified Reviewer
Verified LinkedIn User
Computer Software, 51–200 Employees
Used the Software for: 1+ year
Reviewer Source
Source: GetApp

Ease of use and fast

4.0 7 years ago

Pros:

Realy fast, and requires almost none configuration to get going, I didn't know much about it at the start, but then o learned a lot very fast.

Cons:

People do not get its importance at first, it's a real pain to make them understand why should them to spend time on this sort of thing.

Noman Chowdhury
Founder in Bangladesh
Information Technology & Services, 2–10 Employees
Used the Software for: 1+ year
Reviewer Source

One of the best automated tools for a developer

5.0 2 years ago

Pros:

Circle CI is the best Continuous integration platform that I have ever used. It is fast and reliable, and it allows me to set up different tests for projects and have them run in an automated manner. The interface is clean and intuitive, which has made it a breeze to get started with and learn the ropes with this tool!

Cons:

It makes developer life so much easy. So it's 100% recommended . You will never regret of using it.

Timothy
VP Of Development in US
Computer Software, 11–50 Employees
Used the Software for: 1+ year
Reviewer Source

Great tool

4.0 4 years ago

Comments: We have been able to do some incredible things with Circle CI as our continuous integration and deployment tool. Definitely recommend!

Pros:

The flexibility of configuring build environments for various technologies stacks and needs is key. Circle CI provides some getting started assistance through documentation and tooling, and once you’re past that there really is very little in terms of constraints holding you back from near infinite flexibility. It’s a great service!

Cons:

The threshold of minimum knowledge required to get started is a bit higher than some of the competitors.

Oystein
Developer in Norway
Events Services, 2–10 Employees
Used the Software for: 2+ years
Reviewer Source

Good product for our ci needs

5.0 4 years ago

Pros:

Easy to use and mac build system. Docker integration

Cons:

User system. Only github and sometimes that is a struggle

Dennis
Developer in Canada
Computer Software, 2–10 Employees
Used the Software for: 6-12 months
Reviewer Source

Alternatives Considered:

CircleCI is a blessing

4.0 5 years ago

Comments: CircleCI is crucial to what we're doing and it's powerful. I've enjoyed using it for awhile now.

Pros:

It's powerful, it's got lots of features, and the customization is limitless. CircleCI improves the developer experience many times over. It's also fairly reliable, and makes handling a large project simpler.

Cons:

It can go down sometimes, debugging can be a bit hard and cryptic. Support is also fairly lackluster.

Verified Reviewer
Verified LinkedIn User
Information Technology & Services, 2–10 Employees
Used the Software for: 1-5 months
Reviewer Source

CircleCI smoothened our provision process!

4.0 6 years ago

Comments: It was great, as CircleCI helped to save our time. Also, it has a nice interface plus webhooks integration for us to build notifications center without any trouble!

Pros:

CircleCI is a great software for provisioning software or applications before publishing them on the production environment. It speeds up our provisioning process and allows us to debug our applications really well! Saved us a lot of time so we can work on something better!

Cons:

The pricing of concurrent jobs and containers is too high, I can set up one myself using other hosting providers at a way cheaper price.

vikash
Frontend Developer in India
Verified LinkedIn User
Management Consulting, 51–200 Employees
Used the Software for: 1+ year
Reviewer Source

My favourite tool for continuous integration :)

4.0 7 years ago

Pros:

It is easy to setup. It can do very fast parallel testing. I find UI of it clear and easy to use. it provide integration of many app like GitHub. it supports 8 languages and 16 databases and it also supports Headless browser.

Cons:

it Does not cache docker images. Docker is way outdated on the VM provided. Other than that i don't find any problem with it. I think it is best

Verified Reviewer
Verified LinkedIn User
Internet, 2–10 Employees
Used the Software for: 6-12 months
Reviewer Source

Great product to test and automate for teams

4.0 5 years ago

Comments: CircleCI helps organize our build pipeline and catch issues early that would cause problems in production.

Pros:

CircleCI is great for doing pipelines and integrating commits from each member of our teams. Great error reporting helps identify errors right away.

Cons:

Their mobile experience needs improvement. Not everything is available on their mobile app and a computer is required for some tasks.

Verified Reviewer
Verified LinkedIn User
Information Technology & Services, 51–200 Employees
Used the Software for: 6-12 months
Reviewer Source
Source: GetApp

Good UI and easy to use build system

5.0 6 years ago

Pros:

Compared to some other build systems such as Jenkins, CircleCI has a much better, more modern UI. It's easy to do the most common tasks, such as check on a failed build, or restart a build.

Cons:

Some setup tasks involved in creating a build or modifying its configuration could be easier, but this was never a hindrance to me using the app.

Harmandeep
Software Engineer in US
, 51–200 Employees
Used the Software for: 1+ year
Reviewer Source
Source: SoftwareAdvice

CircleCI for build/deployment

4.0 7 years ago

Pros:

It helps me to analyze all build quickly in real time. It is pretty simple to configure, setup and use. It has a pretty good integration with various remote repositories and it can run tests and give you results.

Cons:

The learning curve is steep for some developers. It has two versions of the software, which sometimes makes it difficult to manage.

Jonathan
ML Engineer in US
Information Technology & Services, 11–50 Employees
Used the Software for: 2+ years
Reviewer Source

excellent product!

5.0 3 years ago

Pros:

Love this software we use it for automated unit test checks before deploying and it works great!

Cons:

Honestly, I don't have anything in particular that I disliked, you guys have a great product