CircleCI vs GitLab CI: An Unbiased Comparison
Developers never run out of tools that can help them with their daily tasks. Especially when it comes to Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, tools such as CircleCI and GitLab CI have been helping thousands of developers to automate their workflows and speed up their release cycles.
Both CircleCI and GitLab CI are cloud-based CI/CD services, but each has its own strengths and weaknesses. In this post, we will be taking a look at both services, providing a factual and unbiased comparison that will help you decide which one to choose.
CircleCI
CircleCI is a fully-featured CI/CD platform that enables teams to build, test, and deploy software quickly and easily. CircleCI is loved by developers for its ease of use, scalability, and flexibility. Some of the notable features that come with CircleCI include:
- Automatic builds
- Speedy parallel testing
- Smart failure handling
- CircleCI Orbs
One of the biggest advantages of CircleCI is its scalability. CircleCI can handle large and complex builds with ease, making it a popular choice for a wide range of organizations.
GitLab CI
GitLab CI is another popular and fully-featured CI/CD platform that provides developers with everything they need to build, test, and deploy their software. GitLab CI is known for its integration with GitLab, a widely-used version control system. Some of the notable features that come with GitLab CI include:
- Easy setup and configuration
- Integrated code quality analysis
- Automated deployment
- GitLab Runner for self-managed instances
GitLab CI is a powerful tool that has been adopted by many large organizations due to its ease of use and powerful features.
Comparison
Now that we have taken a look at the main features of both services, let's compare CircleCI and GitLab CI side by side.
| Features | CircleCI | GitLab CI |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing (per month) | $30-$2000 | $0-$99 |
| Parallelism | 2-160 | 2-1000 |
| Docker Image Caching | Yes | Yes |
| Custom Environment Images | Yes | Yes |
| Orchestration Support | Yes | Yes |
| Code Quality Analysis | Yes | Yes |
| Webhooks & APIs | Yes | Yes |
| Deployment | Yes | Yes |
| Community Support | Excellent | Good |
From the above comparison, it’s clear that both CircleCI and GitLab CI offer a robust set of features for continuous integration and deployment. While CircleCI comes with a higher price, it boasts a faster parallelism rate, and has more premium features that suit larger organizations. On the other hand, GitLab CI offers powerful features that match with CircleCI, and it is more cost-effective, making it suitable for small and mid-sized businesses.