--- title: CircleCI Reviews meta_title: 'CircleCI Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 511 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how CircleCI works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.4 review_count: 511 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-07-27' parent_category: name: CI/CD Tools url: https://www.g2.com/categories/ci-cd-tools --- # CircleCI Reviews **Vendor:** CircleCI **Category:** [Continuous Integration Tools](https://www.g2.com/categories/continuous-integration) **Average Rating:** 4.4/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 511 ## About 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. ## CircleCI Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users appreciate the **easy integrations** with GitHub and GitLab, enhancing their development workflow seamlessly. (4 reviews) - Users appreciate the **easy integrations** with GitHub and GitLab, enhancing their workflow efficiency and collaboration. (4 reviews) - Users value the **seamless collaboration** with GitHub and GitLab, enhancing team efficiency and problem-solving. (3 reviews) - Users appreciate the **ease of use** of CircleCI, noting simple integration and quick setup with reliable performance. (3 reviews) - Users value the **automation capabilities** of CircleCI, enhancing speed and flexibility in their development workflows. (2 reviews) - Easy Setup (2 reviews) - Users appreciate the **speed, flexibility, and user-friendly interface** of CircleCI, enhancing their continuous integration process. (2 reviews) - Git Integration (2 reviews) - Integration Capabilities (2 reviews) - Testing Automation (2 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users find the **complex configuration** challenging, especially beginners struggling with advanced features and an unintuitive UI. (2 reviews) - Users find the **difficult configuration** challenging, particularly for beginners navigating CI/CD and advanced features. (2 reviews) - Users find CircleCI **expensive** , especially if compilation is not optimized, with a confusing pricing page. (2 reviews) - Users find the **learning curve steep** , particularly for beginners dealing with CI/CD and YAML configurations. (2 reviews) - Users find CircleCI's **complex configuration** challenging for beginners, hindering their learning and initial experience. (1 reviews) - Users find the **complex management** of CircleCI difficult for beginners, especially when dealing with advanced features. (1 reviews) - Users find the **complex templating** of CircleCI challenging, particularly for beginners navigating advanced features. (1 reviews) - Users find the **interface confusing** , making it difficult to navigate and use effectively for reports. (1 reviews) - Integration Issues (1 reviews) - Limited Flexibility (1 reviews) ## CircleCI Reviews ### 1. CircleCI makes integrating CI into your workflow a breeze **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Pooja G. | Full Stack Engineer, Hospital & Health Care, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 24, 2017 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** CircleCI provides really easy to use interface for integration. It has default integrations to a lot of frameworks such as Django, RoR etc. Its integrates seamlessly with Github. And the CircleCI dashboard is very well designed. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** Nothing particularly. They do have system outages regularly. But there are also very quick at fixing it. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** Having better code quality and ensuring every git commit is well tested. ### 2. The developer of the initial landing **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sara R. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 19, 2016 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** This service is directly integrated with GitHub, the developer of the initial landing, CircleCI will scan its application in GitHub containers. After a simple installation process, if you need to guide the developer on how to compile and deploy. Every time the preparation of the code, CircleCI will automatically compile the application, automatic test, if the user is using a similar TestFlight tools, CircleCI will automatically apply the deployment. CircleCI was founded by Biggar Paul and Rohner Allen. Biggar received a PhD in computer science and worked at Mozilla. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** Simply say. In the first machine node, I specify the JDK version of JDK Oracle 8 (the default is OpenJDK 7). Then added a ANDROID_HOME of the environmental variables point to the location of the SDK Android (TMD, since you are in the document have said SDK Android in this path, it does not give me a good environment variable). **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** Dependencies node, if it recognizes that you are a Gradle project, by default it is just dependencies gradle. So the result is obvious - at least to put the SDK Build-tools Android installed on it XD Yes, its own version of Gradle is 1.10, a little old. And habits we should use their wrapper to run the (Travis Ci at this point is very good, if the judge to the wrapper./gradlew will use your project to run, and is not a system gradle command). ### 3. Why I like Circle CI **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 27, 2017 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** Really easy to set up, flexible, easy to scale. Generally fast. Like the ability to SSH into the tests. The UI integrates nicely into our other tools **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** No particularly strong issues, the front end sometimes doesn't update if you leave the window open. **Recommendations to others considering CircleCI:** It's worth your time **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** We don't run our own Jenkins server anymore, that was a pain. ### 4. Easy to use at a good price tag **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kristian Houlberg . | CEO & Co-founder, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 14, 2017 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** - Super simple to setup - Good price - Excellent support for deployment **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** It lacks features found in Jenkins CI such as dependencies and using variables from one build job in another **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** CircleCI helps our dev team spend less time on deployment and testing and more time writing code. ### 5. A Good Option for Hosted Continuous Integration **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 27, 2017 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** It is very simple to configure a build and connect it with Github for continuous integration. Deployment to well known hosts such as Heroku is equally simple. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** There is not much to differentiate this service from competitors. There are a number of CI solutions that all work and this is simply another option. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using CircleCi to manage our continuous integration process. New branches and commits are recognized via integration with Github and a build is automatically triggered. Certain branches can be tagged to run deploy commands if all tests are successful. ### 6. Engineering lead on an open source project using CircleCI **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** David L. | Senior Software Engineer, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 03, 2016 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** I don't have to host it and it's free for open source projects. For a relatively simple (dependency-wise) Go project with a good suite of unit tests, it was easy to get running, integrated with GitHub to ensure every PR was passing our unit tests. Once it's all configured it's great, it just works. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** YAML configuration files are kind of a pain. The available database services seem to be targeting a cross section of technologies and outside of the old school core RDBs (MySQL, PostgreSQL), hit a mix of highly used, and kind of esoteric options (do they have a lot of Neo4j or Riak users?). It would be nice to see a few more options available (we have a RethinkDB integration, hint, hint...) because I'm not going to pick my services because the CI system supports it, I'm going to pick a CI system because it supports my services. **Recommendations to others considering CircleCI:** If you're test and build environments are relatively straightforward, it's a good tool. However other solutions are easier to work with as your setup becomes increasingly complex. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** Automating test runs against all submitted PRs. We later added a CodeCov integration and we submit coverage analysis from CircleCI over to CodeCov. That visibility helped us raise our test coverage from ~55% to ~75% over about 3 months, all through small, less than 1%, bumps in coverage with each PR merged to master. ### 7. Nice CI with good docker support **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Bharat S. | Junior Financial Analyst, Financial Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 30, 2016 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** CircleCI really impresses me with a few things - 1. Build on Linux + OSX + Android - CircleCI is the most cross-platform hosted CI server that I've ever seen - it currently supports Linux and OSX, alongwith app builds for Android and IOS. I really love the fact that they dont play favourites with their service, it wants to support all popular platforms that developers want. Moneywise, I think this is good as I only have to pay once for all the services. Even though it seems to be priced at the higher end, because I take advantage of most of the platforms it supports, I think its worth it for me. 2. Auto-parallelisation - This is another great feature that I miss on other platforms - what CircleCI does is that it automatically splits your commands into separate batches and runs them in parallel to speed up the whole process. And circle does deliver on its speed promises. 3. Integration with services like Heroku + Coveralls + Sauce labs - CircleCI has loads of useful integrations with some lesser popular services like Sauce Labs and Coveralls and as I said, they are important to cover all aspects of your good coding practises like Code quality and Multi-browser testing for webapps. 4. Docker support - Docker is the rising star of testing in the last few years and CircleCI does a decent job of enabling developers to take advantage of it. Dev-test-production equivalence on docker means that you dont need to worry about developer builds/machines having different configuration than production. The whole environment is created every time on demand from docker images, so there is no chance of dirtying your production system. Also, all public and private Docker registry is supported via simple Docker push and Docker pull commands. 5. Community preview (beta) - CircleCi has a good outreach program for their active users, where they basically send emails or show notifications in the sidebar about their new developments and urge you to try it out. Good thing is they know that because it is a beta thing, stuff may break and assign a Customer support to you pro-actively, in case you may need some help with rollback or want to provide feedback. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** I really dont have too much to complain against them, but still here are the little problems I have faced over time - 1. Build matrix for multiple builds is not supported like in Travis or Appveyor - it is really needed for testing many combination of environments to make sure all permutations are checked. You can still hand code all the options, but it doesnt seem like a good use of time for developers. 2. After subscribing to their beta preview, they upgraded their OS image for my account and a lot of things were changed in the new image, essentially making multiple language version configurations very tedious. That broke my tests and they couldnt offer immediate solution to it after describing to them, only they promised to report it to their developers in turn. It was not a big problem though, as they rolled back my account to normal OS image after reporting about this. **Recommendations to others considering CircleCI:** Hosted CI seems to be the flavour of the year, so there is a lot of good options and the competition is only rising. You should definitely do your trial with a few of these before you finally decide on the optimal one. Only I would suggest that CircleCI is one of the good ones in the sea of CI services and worth trying out. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** In my day job, we use it for testing docker-based projects for our client support. Its docker-support is pretty top-notch and very fast compared to other options we have tried. Although it is new to the scene, it seems quite rock stable in our daily use, which is why we decided to use it exclusively for some projects. ### 8. Circle is my friend **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 28, 2017 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** I really enjoy the simplicity. It just works. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** Waiting on everything to run............ **Recommendations to others considering CircleCI:** n/a **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** Continuous Integration ### 9. Deploying Docker Containers and Open Source Products **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Austin R. | Application Engineer, Backend, Internet, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 29, 2016 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** I liked that it make testing docker containers super easy. It took about 2-3 minutes to set up and was extremely easy to add other people to use. I currently use it for all my open source products for continuous integration over Travis CI which makes things a lot easier. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** It had 1 major outage which affected my production deploys for a day. I do not have any other complaints besides that one day but they sent free swag to make up for it and were awesome about it. **Recommendations to others considering CircleCI:** It only works with Github so be conscious about that if you have to support Stash or anything else. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** We needed a better way to solve CI testing and deploys. We were using Codeship but they had not released docker support at the time which has currently changed. We needed something that supported docker easily and not docker as well. It integrated with Github nicely and made things super easy for me to set up for the team. ### 10. Practical and efficient **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 31, 2017 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** Its simple to use yet complete, we get quick feedback about our development process. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** low visibility of documentation, I think there should be a better way to reach the essential tools instead of having to dig around the rest of the features **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** Continues integration, automated deployment for an agile team ### 11. Speed and convention over configuration for the win **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Telecommunications | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 24, 2017 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** Getting up and going is a breeze. I spent weeks trying to get some other CI tools implemented. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** Container management needs more refinement. Sucks when you containers go unused because of parallelization settings and then other repos, get stuck in the queue. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** Speed. Speed to get automated test done and features into production. ### 12. Positive overall **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Simon L. | Software Engineer, Financial Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 24, 2017 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** Seamlessly integrates with Github and is ridiculously easy to setup **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** Outages seem to occur more than I would like, likely because Circle depends on a lot of other services? **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** Having an efficient and reliable CI / CD pipeline, the benefits are frequent and reliable deployments and the ability to ship features quicker. ### 13. Pretty darn good. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 24, 2016 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** CircleCI let's you focus on development and getting things done. It's not another responsibility and it allows you to use your time more wisely (coding rather than baby sitting builds) **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** The UI needs work. During builds we get a bunch of logs spit out and it takes forever to scroll down and follow along with the logs. This is seriously annoying and the behaviour doesn't seem consistent. Some initial set up also isn't all that simple, but once you get it going it's not really a big deal. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps you and your team focus on writing code and building features, compared to other CI solutions circle isn't another responsibility. Once it's set up it usually does its thing and it does it well. It's become invaluable. ### 14. Fantastic continuous integration services **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 22, 2016 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** CircleCI is one of the best continuous integration platforms available. Their services are fast and very feature rich, allowing things such as ssh capabilities for failing builds etc which can save mountains of time. Their service is very good at getting default builds running, and allows tweaking from there to make the build and running processes as smooth a possible. The support is always fantastic, with responses often coming within minutes of enquiries. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** Native support for some up and coming technologies has been slow to evolve e.g. Elixir; however there are many unofficial methods out there to support most technologies. **Recommendations to others considering CircleCI:** Try it out, the free tier is very generous, there's likely to be very little that you'd want to accomplish in the continuous integration space that you won't be able to do. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** Continuous Integration needs to be at the core of every development team. We have tried many providers, including hosting our own, and nothing had the simplicity and reliability that we've had with CircleCI. ### 15. CircieCI is easy to use and helped us be more agile! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 31, 2017 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** Easy setup and integrations! You can deploy to Heroku/AWS with ease! **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** Documentation was a bit scattered I felt, but after a while it wasn't so bad. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** We needed a way to build a pipeline. Code -> Push -> Test -> Deploy CircleCI met those needs and more! ### 16. CI SaaS done right **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 05, 2016 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** My three favorite features of CircleCI are the clean user interface, the ease of setting up parallelism, and the ease of configuration of builds. All three of these combined make CircleCI an experience that keeps me happy with their product. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** We would strongly like the ability for CircleCI to do our full continuous deployment, but we run our stack in a VPC at AWS, so this is not an option right now. **Recommendations to others considering CircleCI:** Definitely give their free trial a spin, but I don't doubt you will be extremely pleased. Make sure to try out all aspects, not just test running / build automation, but also delve into making your own configuration file and triggering tasks based on build events. This will give you the full experience and a good idea of the effort required for setup within your organization. Don't just take my word for it. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are solving for build automation, and have reaped this benefit tenfold. Our builds run faster and more stable than they ever did locally. We also trigger tasks like static code analysis and test coverage metrics upon build completion, which is an awesome thing to have automated. ### 17. Using it with Rails **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 27, 2017 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** I love the simplistic user interface and the notifications on web. I appreciate the intergration with github and easy of install with Rails. The open pull request button is so handy now! **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** The service is very similar to other services and needs to find a way to individualize from other competitors. **Recommendations to others considering CircleCI:** That is is easy for setup and has a great free plan. We also use the two container plan to increase speed of builds. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** Running tests, and saving time, improving quality for the application. ### 18. Circle review **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ben B. | CTO, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 31, 2017 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** Speed + ease of deployment, git integration, ios integration **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** When I go to www.circle.com I have to click go to app vs just getting dropped at the dashboard **Recommendations to others considering CircleCI:** IOS testing is great **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** the classic CD/CI - huge benefits to every piece of the puzzle ### 19. Best CI tool **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dominik D. | Lead Engineer, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 24, 2017 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** The speed of the builds, and containers for each build, which makes it easy to configure the environment. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** Lack of the ability to run builds on schedule rather than on each commit. **Recommendations to others considering CircleCI:** Very quick transition setup. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** CircleCI allows us to have a continuous deployment of our projects. ### 20. Circel Ci is easy to integrate and use with cool UI/UX **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Gaurav S. | Senior Software Engineering, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 25, 2016 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** Circle Ci is easy to use, integrate and have cool UI. I mostly love all the feature of it. It also provide 1 free container that is good for open source project. Open source project owner can be use this Circle Ci integration tool easily. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** Some times it's take a lot of time for test a build, i think it can make faster. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** Continuous Integration for the product and Apps are easy to achieve with circle ci. [Ci skip] is also supported by circle Ci so if we don't want to run CI for documentation releated code then it's make easy to use. ### 21. Easy to use **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Renewables & Environment | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 24, 2017 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** Ease of setup and use. I like drilling down to the branch level and seeing the history of build successes/failures for that branch. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** I've had issues with the dashboard UI being sluggish, using lots of resources in Firefox 51.0.1 and sometimes the UI doesn't stop loading. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** Continuous integration and making sure all tests pass before a deploy. ### 22. CircleCi as part of CD pipeline **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Music | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 24, 2017 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** The UI is very good. Things are clear and easy to read. Integration with GitHub is also very good! SSH access has been very useful. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** Circle.yml can be quite confusing. The ability to use self to built build machines would be good as well. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's speed up creation of articacts. Seeing as it's SaaS for a startup like us; not having to deal with maintenance is a god send. ### 23. Best CI available. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 31, 2017 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** Ease of set up and configuration, and functional stability. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** Can't really think of anything. they pretty much kill it. **Recommendations to others considering CircleCI:** do it, you'll love it. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** 1-button deploy. ### 24. Been great, few bumps but not that bad **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 27, 2017 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** Automated tests and deployments based on Github commits **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** Some containers screw up from time to time. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** Benefits management for companies. We can ship software faster ### 25. Great if you need heavier features, otherwise heroku's CI features work just fine **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Leisure, Travel & Tourism | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 23, 2016 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** I love the automation of it. No issues with a developer forgetting to run a specific suite of tests, because you can't push without it. Also a little bit of public shaming when someone brakes the build is always fun. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** We have a super basic setup. A couple of projects, with basic unit test and only a team of 3 developers so it's just a little too heavy for us. I don't see the benefit of dealing with the confusing UI when the heroku CI github integration works just find and is all in the same place. **Recommendations to others considering CircleCI:** Checkout heroku or Travis **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** Making sure we don't push broken code! ### 26. Lesser-known CI server with debug via SSH and dependency cache **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Abhas B. | Trainee Decision Scientist, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 16, 2015 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** Things that I like arranged sorted by usefulness - 1. * Debug via SSH * - This is pretty much the best feature it has, where you can actively debug your builds when there is a error instead of just failing. As the tests are run on their containers, it gives you full access to the container. No other popular CI server that I know of, like Travis, Appveyor have this kind of feature - most of them only provide read-only log of all builds, they are your only way of understanding which things went wrong in the CI build. 2. Build on Linux + OSX => Most of its competitors like Appveyor and Travis are stuck with only supporting one main platform for building your code and I have been always searching for a good cross-platform solution which works on all 3 major platforms. Although it doesnt meet that standard, OSX support is the missing piece of puzzle as none others actively support OSX right now (Travis are working on it). So, providing Linux+OSX testing makes sure that atleast it works on the major unix-based machines 3. Dependency Cache.- Automagically, the dependency files downloaded in the dependency install step are cached in a system and re-used in the next run. It really speeds up the process. 4. Artifacts with logs - Artifacts are the files you can prepare from the CI server as a output of the build process. they can be used for build purpose as well as logging purpose if you like to deal with log files. It can also be useful for external deployment where you take that file and deploy it yourself. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** Things are generally seem a bit hard to setup if you are coming from something like Travis CI. It doesnt allow multiple test configurations or test matrix creation natively and this is definitely the biggest thing that I miss in Circle Ci. Other smaller dislikings, in no such order are - 1. Oddly arranged UI - I sometimes cant find the stuff where I expect them to be and they are either shown using not understandable icons or small text. For eg, when you try to import a project from Github, forked repos are not shown and the only way to show them is by checking a "Show forks" option which is not well highlighted and I first thought it cant even show the forks or it is a bug, as forked repos are so common. Also, similarly the "add repos" button is on the side, but oddly not on the top where you expect them but the third one, with a not so understandable icon. 2. Unstable relative to Travis CI and sometimes weird bugs popup regarding 3rd party integrations. To its benefit, it has good open bug tracker in place. 3. No pre-installed python interpreters, atleast not named in default configuration - so you might have to write another config file for it, which is usually OK but hard to maintain when you are dealing with another CI too. **Recommendations to others considering CircleCI:** Currently, there are 3 popular CI in the market 1. Travis CI 2. Appveyor 3. Circle CI Circle CI is the least known, but the most-featured, almost the same as Appveyor but both serve mutually exclusive platform, so there is need to use both. Travis clearly falls behind Circle CI in this matter, but has a lot of visibility and is simple to use for starters - so Travis is the leading CI server right now. But I can give you my words, Circle is so much more powerful if you give it a spin. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** Problem - Testing internal python modules on different OS and compiling them into system-specific platform packages. Because there is no single CI which supports all platforms, we needed to pair it up with a windows-supported CI like appveyor. Benefits - For supporting linux, we first tried out Travis CI and was happy with it. Then came along Circle CI, which is not as popular as Travis but really has a lot of features (mentioned first) and supports both Linux + OSX with containers. It was a win-win for us because we could test on OSX too now, which Travis doesnt support right now. Setup was easy, but we still needed to setup python interpreters on it with custom circle.yml file. After that, everything went smooth and build got triggered properly and ran pretty fast due to awesome caching - even faster than Travis. In short, it worked great and we really understood how much more any other CI could offer, just by trying out Circle CI. They do have a lofty vision for CI. ### 27. Circle CI is topnotch! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 12, 2016 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** I like the ease of adding circle CI to a project on github. It's really easy. Also the interface is very clean intuitive and tidy. You can easily look through build histories and easily navigate between projects. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** What I currently dislike is that it doesn't support all android sdk's right out of the box. So if you're using the latest android sdk you'll have to modify you're circle configuration file to get it to work. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** I been able to catch bugs that I wouldn't have been able to have guessed even llr existed, like one of my projects compilef of my machine fine but only because I had the dependencies installed from another project, I wouldn't have been able to catch that if not for Circle CI. What I've bennefited the most is the fact that I can be rest assured that regardless of who recently made changes I can be assured that I know whether their build passed the test cases aND other people can tell too with the circle CI badges ### 28. CircleCI is capable, sometimes. **Rating:** 2.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 27, 2017 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** when it works, it works well. Set it and forget it. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** The live update on the dashboard is often dead wrong, requires refreshing page **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** helps ensure we aren't releasing broken features to production, always a huge benefit. ### 29. Very well implemented continuous integration solution. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vitaly P. | Ruby developer, Internet, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 25, 2016 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** I really like ease of setup and using CircleCI. They have recently changed the design and I find it's UI very well thought through: all the build statuses and important information are available from the builds index page while any additional information is available on an according build page. Maybe it's just my preferences but I think such services as CircleCI benefit a lot from being a SPA. I would hate to wait for page reloads while navigating through the builds. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** Sometimes, I encounter problems related to outdated cache and I have to rebuild a build manually. I am not sure if it's my app setup or CircleCI issue, though. **Recommendations to others considering CircleCI:** You should consider using it. Primarily because of the great user interface and ease of use. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have 5 developers and a lot of unit tests. It's really useful to have the tests run for different brunches and deploying our servers on merge to master/staging hooks. ### 30. Super awesome CI **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Richard Y. | Senior Software Engineer, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 20, 2016 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** Nice interface, realtime build logs, works with Ruby on Rails, rspec, and cucumbers. Integrates with Heroku and deploys after each successful build. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** Nothing to dislike. It's a free product, and does awesome stuff. **Recommendations to others considering CircleCI:** It's one of the best cloud based CI tools out there. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** Continuous integration in the cloud. Way better and easier than a custom built solution, and CircleCI solves that. ### 31. A great hosted CI service **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Micah H. | Site Reliability Engineer, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 23, 2016 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** There are a lot of things to like about Circle CI. • It is very easy to set up, you can even set it up without a configuration file and it will try to infer your test runner and language. • It is easy to configure with a straight-forward YAML configuration. • It has great integration with services like Github and Slack. • You can easily debug broken builds by SSH-ing into the test container and quickly figure out what is going wrong • There is no configuration difference for public or private repositories, CircleCi appropriately mirrors Github • The pricing allows for unlimited repositories, the tiers are based on parallel builds. This is great if you have a lot of private repos. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** I really wish CircleCI had the ability to have a build matrix (like TravisCI), for example, run my python tests against all four combinations of Python 2 and 3, and say Django 1.8 and 1.9. Support is generally pretty good, but can be hit or miss on timing. We've had quick responses, and other times waited multiple days for a response. **Recommendations to others considering CircleCI:** Definitely check out other providers, but for private projects we have been very happy with CircleCI. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** We initially implemented it for automated testing of all our private repositories, and have been overall very happy with it. We looked at using it for our Open Source projects, but due to the fact that it doesn't support build matrices, we ended up going with TravisCI for public projects. ### 32. CI For Any Project **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jamie C. | Web Developer, Computer Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 18, 2016 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** - Easy to set up - can get a basic deployment up and running in minutes, or extend CircleCI's features to support large, dynamic deploys. - Beautiful, rich user interface. Easy to navigate and configure. I feel like a lot of times I spend more time navigating a website to do basic configurations than I do using the product. This is not the case with Circle. - Friendly support staff with great built in support feature to get responses fast from people who know. - Detailed logs - Multiple code insertion points (pre-test, post-test, etc.) **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** - SSH deploys are very basic - shell behaves erratically during complex SSH deploys - SSH sometimes hangs up or does not properly indicate failure - Basically, SSH deploys could be greatly improved. Workaround now is to build the deploy script on the server and use Circle to launch a single command - however, error handling suffers here as a result. Would be great to be able to establish an SSH session to deploy. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** I've used Circle to deploy Django APIs and an angular front end being built with Grunt automatically using GitHub webhooks. It took me a few hours to get the original configuration working smoothly, but since then I have rarely even had to open CircleCI and have just waited two minutes after a push to GitHub to check, and the changes are fully deployed on the target server. ### 33. Continuous Integration flexible and modern **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ángel V. | Senior Software Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 30, 2016 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** You pay for containers so you can have lots of projects running their integrations in the same container, in that sense is cheaper than TravisCI service, and generate the .circle.yml file on the repo can be done too on the UI **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** I didn't found shell tools for check the .yml syntax of the .yml file though the alternative of being generated by the web is cool. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** It was a travel company with lots of subsystems and apis connected, so continuos integrations of these apis was critical in order to don't have downtimes, or bugs that can interrupt the service ### 34. Keeping things simple **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Publishing | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 27, 2017 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** Makes continuous integration very easy. Love that it integrates well with Github **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** Setting it up initially can be a bit tricky **Recommendations to others considering CircleCI:** Integrate with Github **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** eCommerce coalitions. Circle has made it easy to continually release new features. ### 35. small team tested **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 01, 2016 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** The docker integration is super handy when I'm lucky enough to have a side project built that way. I have used it without docker for smaller projects too... I even think that is better than Travis, but my experience is less deep there. The setup is painless **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** The interface is a bit sparse in an unhelpful way. Either the text and elements could be bigger, or more could be added. I don't often use the web interface, but when I do it's a "meh" experience. **Recommendations to others considering CircleCI:** I think it's the best built-in CI for docker environments I've used so if that applies to you it might be worth switching. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use it for small client projects with private repos and few specs along with developing larger internal services in docker environments. ### 36. Good consistent CI **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Oscar M. | Software Engineer, Leisure, Travel & Tourism, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 23, 2016 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** Good UI, all the most common and expected features of a CI tool. Slick UI with a great UX. Fast builds. One free build container. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** No bitbucket support. No open source free projects. No obvious way to encrypt secrets (a little confusing documentation). **Recommendations to others considering CircleCI:** Look at Travis CI and CodeShip first. These all have similarities, but the other two are preferred for me. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** Continuous integration. ### 37. CircleCI is great for automating tests and releases. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 27, 2017 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** Ability to define custom environments, fantastic Github integration. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** Slow to adopt new releases of languages and tools, specifically Docker. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** Automated testing and deployment building. ### 38. Really easy to use CI server **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Andrew S. | Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 30, 2015 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** It was super simple to create my circle.yml file and check it into my repo. I had tried using Bamboo and couldn't figure it out. Everything runs smoothly and quickly. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** I don't have anything specific to complain about. The tool is very straightforward and I haven't had any issues with it. I was grandfathered in and only pay $19/month for two containers. I think $50/month is pricey for that (the current pricing) but it's free for one container. **Recommendations to others considering CircleCI:** Give it a shot with the free container. I found that their documentation was really good and when I had questions their support helped me out very quickly. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have a SaaS application built with PHP. CircleCI checks all our unit tests and if they pass on our staging or production branches it also handles deployment. Really nice to not have to do that manually. ### 39. Refreshing alternative to Travis **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** David B. | Senior Web Developer, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 28, 2016 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** Easy to get up and running. Has sensible defaults (unlike travis) eg if your project contains a package.json it will run npm install and cache node_module. Both of these require manual configuration in Travis. I've found the documentation excellent so far. The first CI product I've used that just works out the box in an intuitive way. Free plan supports private repos which is a big advantage over travis. Much more competitive pricing (again, compared to travis). **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** Auto configuration isn't working perfectly yet. Eg doesn't read the node version from package.json engines and the default version is very old (0.10.x). Not as many service addons as travis (eg mysql) **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** Quick, reliable deployments ### 40. Easy to use and setup, UI could be improved **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Daniela S. | Java / Scala Team Leader, Utilities, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 15, 2016 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** Super easy to setup and love the automatic integration with the most common services -- in particular the docker integration and the opportunity of having pre-installed tools like postgres. I LOVE the ability of ssh on the machine to debug. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** The UI is a bit confusing, it took me a while to get used to it. My main issue is that I don't have a overall visual of what is left to do, so I have to "remember" the steps that will help in the future -- and this doesn't help when estimating when the pipeline is going to end. **Recommendations to others considering CircleCI:** Super easy to setup -- it will literally going to take you 5 minutes **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** Easy deployment and releases ### 41. Solid CI for python and node apps **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Andy I. | Senior Fullstack Engineer, E-Learning, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 28, 2016 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** The UI for running tests is nice, and it's pretty dependable. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** The configuration, while easy enough (YAML file) is also currently impossible to validate without trying a test run. Whenever I set up a new project, I end going through several iterations just to get all the pieces working correctly. The setup for getting a new github project building is also a little tricky to figure out. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** Full test runs for every PR and deployment on every merge to develop/master. ### 42. Easy to use build system with one build server provided for free **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dmitry S. | Software Engineer, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 07, 2016 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** Easy to setup, does not requires additional configurations for most of projects. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** They do not provide additional build servers for Open Source projects, so it's better to use Travis CI for them. **Recommendations to others considering CircleCI:** Consider to use Travis CI if you want to use it with open source project. But if it's commercial – git it a try. It's really easy to set it up. You don't need any special configuration in most of cases. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** Build system to run python tests, build using grunt and deployment on Google App Engine. ### 43. Like the UI, hard to setup **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 28, 2016 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** UI, ability to restart builds, jump through different builds **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** Only runs on docker 1.8 (as of about a month ago) that made us move away from circleci. **Recommendations to others considering CircleCI:** It is hard to understand setting up hooks to github repos/ other ecosystems, take some time to understand it better. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** Continuous deployment, and precommit checks. Works with most tools that we've used, hooks into different ecosystems like github/ aws. ### 44. CircleCI is reliable and easy to use **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 28, 2016 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** Simple configuration to its servers and with Github, reliable service, and very expressive for executing different types of tests. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** Not always the most up-to-date versions of software (ex: docker versions), sometimes (but very infrequently) can be slow **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our use case is very simple CI for running tests on pull requests, it's convenient that it has high availability and completes in a ### 45. Deliver your products faster with CircleCI **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ramón L. | Analista de Sistemas, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 12, 2016 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** Makes product delivery easier with build tools that help you have your product in production state without losing time in configurations. It also allows collaboration which is a nice feature. Integration with github is also a plus. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** It's a bit pricey if you are already paying for other services. User interface could be improved. **Recommendations to others considering CircleCI:** I recommend to try this after you have a solid base in building and deploying so you can truly take advantage of its potential. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** Building projects is made easier because you don't have to lose time configuring things that can be ready to use. ### 46. great CI tool **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Yasmany C. | DevOps Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 08, 2016 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** the ability of ssh into vm/containers is really amazing, since it allows you to easily debug CI configurations and reduce executions trying to fix that configuration **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** It does not have ability to integrate with bitbucket **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** CI and CD. ### 47. Best CI solution on the market **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 08, 2016 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** The best, simplest tool for performing continuous integration. This is the best tool by far on the market. Fast, super simple to get started. No complaints at all about this product. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** The interface came seem clunky at times. CircleCI can be expensive as your team scales up. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** We required continuous integration for the projects we deliver. We were doing build automation, and deployment as well through CircleCI. ### 48. CircleCI **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 28, 2016 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** Very easy to get started, you are able to add custom steps **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** Hard to do multi-stage integrations - ie unit tests followed by integration tests **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** software developing - able to find bugs/breaks in software faster ### 49. Fast and easy continuous integration **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 09, 2015 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** Easy to configure with seamless integration with GitHub and tests execute quickly. CircleCI supports email, chat, and webhook notifications. SSH access to test containers is extremely useful in debugging test configurations. Supports continuous deployment to Heroku, AWS (through CodeDeploy), and Google App Engine. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** It's a very minor complaint, but it would be useful to be able to define environment variable for all projects / group of projects. The current look of the admin interface is a bit crowded, but the new redesign is a greatly improved user experience. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** Continuous integration has helped us ensure quality and enabled continuous deployment. ### 50. Very quick to get started **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 10, 2016 **What do you like best about CircleCI?** 1500 free minutes every month are more than enough to experience the platform. It does almost everything magically. You hardly need to configure anything. **What do you dislike about CircleCI?** Cost of OS X packages and minutes you get against those packages. **What problems is CircleCI solving and how is that benefiting you?** Completed CI&CD with just a few lines of YAML configuration. ## CircleCI Discussions - [What is CircleCI used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-circleci-used-for) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [Where can I found documentation or examples about integration with different programming languages](https://www.g2.com/discussions/where-can-i-found-documentation-or-examples-about-integration-with-different-programming-languages) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [What's the best way to view my jobs on a mobile application for Android?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/15983-what-s-the-best-way-to-view-my-jobs-on-a-mobile-application-for-android) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [Do you offer an on-premise version of your software?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/getting-started-afea13c4-02da-420b-9bbe-1f26f8a9e305) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [Can I change my plan at a later time? Can I cancel anytime?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/getting-started-0a9fc8e0-0026-493c-a3e1-f9b18abbe187) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [View CircleCI pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/circleci/reviews?page=10§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-08-02+18%3A56%3A58+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=28fe9279-4e40-4161-aa9e-130e8fcf4edf&secure%5Btoken%5D=712b91f5f3f7329f1e6a99e0e0c333999bde00a171561e62fe031db2fe22f77e&format=llm_user) ## CircleCI Integrations - [GitHub](https://www.g2.com/products/github/reviews) ## CircleCI Features **Functionality** - Deployment-Ready Staging - Integration - Extensible **Management** - Configuration Management - Access Control - Orchestration **Functionality** - Integrations - Extensibility - Test Customization **Management** - Processes and Workflow - Reporting - Automation **Functionality** - Automation - Integrations - Extensibility **Management** - Automation - Processes and Workflow - Reporting **Processes** - Pipeline Control - Workflow Visualization - Continuous Deployment **Agentic AI - Continuous Integration** - Autonomous Task Execution - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Natural Language Interaction - Proactive Assistance **Agentic AI - Continuous Delivery** - Autonomous Task Execution - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Natural Language Interaction - Proactive Assistance ## Top CircleCI Alternatives - [GitHub](https://www.g2.com/products/github/reviews) - 4.7/5.0 (2,329 reviews) - [CloudBees](https://www.g2.com/products/cloudbees/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (591 reviews) - [Jenkins](https://www.g2.com/products/jenkins/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (558 reviews)