Best Continuous Integration Tools
Continuous integration (CI) is the practice of frequently building and testing each change made to a codebase. Continuous integration involves developers uploading new code, or code changes, to a common code repository, which is then tested automatically at the time of upload to ensure changes do not cause issues or breaks. By automating tests, users ensure immediately their code is sound and that important software features are operating as expected. By consolidating code to a unified source and testing for code flaws early on in a project or sprint, development teams can save time and prevent delays in the delivery of new software, applications, and features.
Continuous integration systems are an early part of the DevOps workflow that are uniquely defined by each company. They often work seamlessly alongside configuration management software, continuous delivery software, and continuous deployment software.
To qualify for inclusion in the Continuous Integration category, a product must:
Best Continuous Integration Tools At A Glance
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GitHub is where the world builds software. Millions of individuals, organizations and businesses around the world use GitHub to discover, share, and contribute software. Developers at startups to Fort
- Software Engineer
- Senior Software Engineer
- Computer Software
- Information Technology and Services
- 46% Small-Business
- 31% Mid-Market
2,613,551 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
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GitLab is the most comprehensive AI-Powered DevSecOps platform that enables software innovation by empowering development, security, and operations teams to build better software, faster. With GitLab
- Software Engineer
- Senior Software Engineer
- Computer Software
- Information Technology and Services
- 37% Small-Business
- 37% Mid-Market
167,660 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
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Salesforce Platform is the leading low-code development platform that empowers your team to build and extend your Customer 360 with AI, automation, and data. With the Salesforce Platform, you can exec
- Salesforce Developer
- Account Executive
- Computer Software
- Information Technology and Services
- 44% Mid-Market
- 36% Enterprise
584,164 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
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An enterprise-grade server for teams to share code, track work, and ship software — for any language, all in a single package. It’s the perfect complement to your IDE.
- Software Engineer
- Senior Software Engineer
- Information Technology and Services
- Computer Software
- 40% Enterprise
- 39% Mid-Market
14,039,026 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
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Bitrise serves mobile application developers navigating the ever-changing landscape of app development, testing, and app store release. Transcending the boundaries of traditional CI/CD platforms, Bitr
- Software Engineer
- iOS Developer
- Computer Software
- Information Technology and Services
- 54% Small-Business
- 33% Mid-Market
10,259 Twitter followers
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AutoRABIT is the only complete DevSecOps platform for Salesforce developers. Incorporate static code analysis, data security, and CI/CD capabilities to increase the security, release velocity, and qua
- Salesforce Developer
- Software Engineer
- Computer Software
- Information Technology and Services
- 48% Enterprise
- 31% Mid-Market
1,243 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
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AWS CodePipeline is a continuous integration and continuous delivery service for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates.
- Computer Software
- Information Technology and Services
- 36% Small-Business
- 33% Enterprise
2,231,347 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Semaphore is the fastest continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) platform on the market, powering the world’s best engineering teams. Our aim is to make CI/CD practices more accessible to develope
- CTO
- Software Engineer
- Computer Software
- Information Technology and Services
- 67% Small-Business
- 25% Mid-Market
512 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
The Complete DevOps Platform. CloudBees empowers your software delivery teams to transform your business. CloudBees platform brings together development, operations, IT, security, and business teams t
- Software Engineer
- DevOps Engineer
- Information Technology and Services
- Computer Software
- 48% Enterprise
- 40% Mid-Market
40,203 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
The leading open source automation server, Jenkins provides hundreds of plugins to support building, deploying and automating any project.
- Software Engineer
- Senior Software Engineer
- Information Technology and Services
- Computer Software
- 41% Enterprise
- 37% Mid-Market
7,965 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
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Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform is Red Hat's primary enterprise automation product offering., it includes all of the tooling needed for building, deploying, and managing end-to-end automation at
- Software Engineer
- DevOps Engineer
- Information Technology and Services
- Financial Services
- 44% Enterprise
- 38% Mid-Market
294,135 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
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Pantheon is the website operations (WebOps) platform top developers, marketers, and IT use to build, launch and run their Drupal & WordPress websites. Pantheon includes all of the tools profess
- Web Developer
- Software Engineer
- Marketing and Advertising
- Information Technology and Services
- 66% Small-Business
- 26% Mid-Market
23,101 Twitter followers
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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
- Software Engineer
- Senior Software Engineer
- Computer Software
- Information Technology and Services
- 45% Small-Business
- 43% Mid-Market
40,332 Twitter followers
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ACCELQ offers AI-powered No-Code test automation and management built on a cloud-native platform. ACCELQ provides a unified platform for web, mobile, API, database, and packaged apps. Automation-first
- Information Technology and Services
- Computer Software
- 41% Mid-Market
- 38% Enterprise
1,939 Twitter followers
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- User Satisfaction
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Copado empowers every Salesforce development team to plan, build, test and deliver applications with speed and confidence by unifying CI/CD pipelines and automated testing on one platform — all powere
- Salesforce Developer
- Software Engineer
- Information Technology and Services
- Telecommunications
- 58% Enterprise
- 27% Mid-Market
2,224 Twitter followers
Learn More About Continuous Integration Tools
What are Continuous Integration Tools?
Continuous integration, at its core, refers to the development practice of writing and integrating code from multiple developers into one shared repository that forms the current software build. In a collaborative DevOps environment, this means that different developers can work on and test different parts of the repository simultaneously. Each completed code branch is then automatically verified against the current repository build via tests before integrating to avoid conflicting code. Continuous integration software allows developers to build, package, and test their software continuously. Companies can make immediate codebase changes automatically and ensure applications are working properly before deployment or release. Continuous integration also lets developers detect software errors early on in the production process and enables quality assurance teams to identify weaknesses in a piece of software’s code. This reduces the risk of bugs and vulnerabilities in new programs.
Continuous integration is either the step before continuous delivery or part of the continuous delivery umbrella. Continuous delivery is a practice closely related to general DevOps approaches, but it is significantly more specific and outlined. Developers aim to create software that is redeployable during its lifecycle. It involves having team members continuously viewing, testing, trading feedback on, and releasing software changes.
Continuous integration and DevOps helps companies automate updates and improve the time it takes to deliver their product. They can also identify and remedy issues more quickly and frequently. In all, the implementation of CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) increases development speed, improves product feedback, and allows developers to spend more time perfecting tools and adding functionality, rather than building new apps or features from scratch.
Continuous integration tools provide developers with real-time insights on software deployment. These tools automate many aspects of the continuous integration process and produce valuable metrics on issues within the source code of a program that indicates a deeper problem, code complexity, and code dependency.
What are the Common Features of Continuous Integration Tools?
The following are some core features within Continuous Integration Tools:
Orchestration: Orchestration capabilities allow users to create workflows and schedule jobs to automate aspects of the continuous integration process. This feature grants development teams complete control over their continuous integration processes while automating many of the tasks themselves. For example, teams can set automatic testing to occur at regular intervals or in response to certain event triggers. This orchestration allows teams the flexibility to carry out an efficient continuous integration workflow that works best for them.
Test automation: Continuous integration tools allow users to automate tests as part of the integration process. Developers define tests, then determine when those tests should automatically occur based on cadence or certain conditions being met. This helps users quickly identify issues and revert or update applications. Many automated tests alert developers to potential problems before they integrate code, meaning they can focus on the resolution before causing issues for the rest of the team.
Development teams using continuous integration tools can set the parameters for their automated tests to ensure that such tests are an effective means of quality control. When unforeseen issues slip by, administrators can adjust test parameters accordingly to cover future instances. While test automation might not fully eliminate the need for the occasional manual test, it serves as a robust feature that relieves developers of time-consuming work.
Bug tracking and debugging: Bug tracking and debugging features help users identify the source of issues as they arise. While test automation automatically conducts tests to alert users when issues arise, bug tracking and debugging tools help developers to document progress on known issues and take steps to remediate them. Many continuous integration tools feature issue tagging, allowing team leads to assign out tasks related to each issue. Teams can also prioritize bugs based on urgency and leave documentation and comments for easy collaboration.
Beyond bug and issue tracking, continuous integration tools often offer automated debugging features. In some cases, these features include automated remediation suggestions that can be carried out with the click of a button. At their most basic, debugging features give developers a way to hone in on issues by offering likely causes, granting granular insight into each issue, and giving users an environment in which they can test isolated changes in pursuit of solving the error.
Analytics: Continuous integration tools’ analytics capabilities help measure various performance and uptime metrics. By comparing these outcomes against desired benchmarks, users can visualize the effects of updates and adjust their processes accordingly. Continuous integration tools automatically report key metrics via auto-generated documentation and visual dashboards. In many cases, these metrics can be adjusted based on the specific use cases of the development team using the software.
These constant, real-time insights into software development changes and their impact on projects at large give developers access to vital information almost instantaneously. This allows teams to act on relevant data to best serve the development process without the need to halt production.
Access control: Access control features allow administrators to set user access privileges to permit approved parties to access sensitive data. Because of the fast-paced nature of software development using continuous integration tools, it is important to keep permissions organized to protect data. Access control helps prevent unauthorized changes or updates and inadvertent development catastrophes that can be caused by human error.
Automation: Perhaps continuous integration tools’ most important feature, automation, can be found throughout most of its other features. The natural aim of continuous integration and continuous delivery processes is to enact a constant and rapid software development style, and automation is key in reaching that goal. Rather than interrupt development time with frequent manual tests, users can set up custom test parameters that are then executed automatically, allowing developers to maximize productivity. Myriad tasks such as performance analytics, issue tracking, task prioritization, and more are handled via automated systems within the continuous integration tool. Each of these automated tasks represents work that development teams no longer need to spend time and energy on, which allows them to focus on a streamlined software development process instead. Continuous integration tools’ ability to automate repetitive, mundane tasks makes rapid software development and deployment possible, enabling companies to maintain competitive release schedules.
Feedback management: Testing and delivering feedback is essential to CI/CD development. Feedback management allows team leads and developers to make suggestions on others’ work while also providing a means to collaboratively make each software change the best it can be. Feedback tools help developers ask questions, gauge the impact of changes, and receive first-hand user testimony. While test automation and issue tracking handle software development issues that must be addressed for software to work properly, feedback management is a valuable tool when approaching more qualitative improvements.
Other Features of Continuous Integration Tools: Containers, Databases, Desktop, Mobile, Salesforce, Test customization, Web
What are the Benefits of Continuous Integration Tools?
Continuous delivery: Continuous delivery is only achievable when companies can also achieve continuous integration. This process delivers stable software to a nonproduction environment so developers can ascertain whether the software is releasable. Continuous delivery enables developers to distribute applications more easily, as software builds can be released within seconds of final approval and reach the end user at any time during the production lifecycle. These programs also allow developers to test software in a quicker time frame, enabling more updates to be made to applications.
Continuous delivery goes one step further than continuous integration systems, which are primarily used to build and test software. This software facilitates processes throughout the deployment pipeline, from initial code analysis to the application’s release. Developers use this software to examine and monitor updates in real time and test the functionality of their applications.
Agility: Continuous integration is a component of the pipeline that is often included within the build stage of the continuous delivery process. As code is committed and builds occur, bit by bit, code is integrated into the software’s codebase.
Developers check out code from the repository like they would a book from the library. A continuous integration server monitors the repository as the developer makes changes and tests for successful integrations. Once builds are fully integrated into the source code repository, new features are deployable with the push of a button. The result is an agile, streamlined process by which software development can occur as efficiently as possible.
Who Uses Continuous Integration Tools?
Anyone involved in DevOps processes or developing software using continuous delivery workflows may use continuous integration software. While their titles may vary, the users of continuous integration software will almost always be software developers and engineers.
Software Related to Continuous Integration Tools
Related solutions that can be used together with Continuous Integration Tools include:
Configuration management software: Configuration management software tracks changes to applications and their infrastructure to ensure that configurations are in a known and trusted state, and configuration details don’t rely on tribal knowledge of the development team. Configuration management software is an accurate historical record of the system state, which is helpful for project management, auditing, and debugging. Configuration management software increases efficiency, stability, and visibility into changes that occur in an application, and also streamlines a company’s change control process.
Continuous delivery software: Continuous delivery, as a process, aims to help developers generate deployment-ready code as quickly and efficiently as possible. By facilitating short development cycles with automation, workflows, and more, continuous delivery solutions enable developers to build and execute delivery pipelines to stage software and updates. Some continuous delivery solutions allow for continuous deployment, which automatically pushes deployment-ready code to production. Otherwise, deployment is manual.
DevOps platforms: DevOps platforms give teams the tools and automation capabilities necessary to perform and manage continuous delivery. DevOps platforms handle CI and CD to automate various development tasks and define a successful delivery pipeline. Teams use DevOps platforms to ensure their continuous delivery efforts are well defined, properly automated, and manageable within a single framework to efficiently carry out agile DevOps work environments. Many continuous integration tools exist as part of a larger DevOps platform.
Version control systems: Version control systems, also known as revision control or source control systems, are used to track changes to software development projects and allow team members to change and collaborate on the same files. Version control systems allow developers to work simultaneously on code and isolate their work through what are known as branches. Branches keep code changes protected from the changes in other branches, but they can be merged if and when the developer is ready. Version control systems often form the backbone of many continuous integration tools, though continuous integration tools go further to help teams enact agile software testing and delivery practices.
Challenges with Continuous Integration Tools
Development tool integration: Continuous development goes hand in hand with continuous integration. Continuous integration software is typically compatible with either specific building tools, development environments, or programming languages, though in most cases they support multiple of each. Commits will usually need to be built often and quickly, so a company’s preference in development tools can narrow the search for a continuous integration tool. Some products may be specific to Windows builders, while others are often aligned with Java builders. But many are compatible with myriad building tools.
Preferred development environment: Integrated development environments (IDE) provide a wide range of editing, compiling, and building tools. Buyers looking for a continuous integration product often hope to spend less time merging code and more time developing. Users who have a preferred IDE may be inclined to choose a continuous integration product that integrates with that IDE, but some continuous integration products are not able to integrate with an IDE. Such products often sync with version control systems, data hosting servers, or PaaS products.
How to Buy Continuous Integration Tools
Using G2, a company ready to start the selection process for a continuous integration tool can compare verified peer reviews and ratings based on a few important criteria.
Features: The automation features offered by different continuous integration tools can vary, so organizations should narrow their search based on the features most important to them. For example, if consistent testing has been a pain point, it will be beneficial for an organization to seek out vendors that offer solutions with highly praised test automation capabilities. Authentic G2 reviews made by peers from similar companies can shed light on these factors. A prioritized list of the business’ most desired features enables the software selection team to move forward with a clear idea of what to look for.
Integration with current tools: One of the most important aspects to consider when searching for a continuous integration solution is its integration, or lack thereof, with a company’s current development tools. Companies should weigh this consideration carefully, as one of the main purposes of continuous integration software is to streamline the development process. When these tools don’t integrate smoothly with the current repertoire of software, development becomes clunky and the potential value add is greatly diminished. Software selection teams should have a comprehensive understanding of the tools their organization is already using, and whether their continuous integration solution of choice will mesh.
