# GoCD Reviews **Vendor:** ThoughtWorks **Category:** [Continuous Delivery Tools](https://www.g2.com/categories/continuous-delivery-tools) **Average Rating:** 4.1/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 24 ## About GoCD GoCD is an on-premises, open source, continuous delivery tool with comprehensive pipeline modeling and value stream map to help you get better visibility into and control of your teams' deployments. ## GoCD Reviews ### 1. GoCD experience by a Devops Engineer **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Abhishek R. | R&D Development Associate Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 12, 2023 **What do you like best about GoCD?** I have been using GoCd for the past 1 year. I have been using it as the main pipeline for all our deployments. Features like giving access to different users, feature to create different templates for different pipelines, having a variety of version control systems and the ability to integrate tool and testing frameworks really makes it stand apart. **What do you dislike about GoCD?** When I first started using GoCD, learning all the features was hard due to the low user base. The user interface sometimes feels complex, especially for beginners to set up specific and intricate pipeline configuration, also for which tutorials are hard to find. **What problems is GoCD solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use GoCD for deployment automation are our primary automation pipeline. Integrating aws resources with the help of shell scripts in order to create a one-stop deployment platform.GoCD helps our developers do deployments in the lower environments and devops to do the production deployments with the help of role access feature. ### 2. Decent Open Source CI/CD tool **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vithushan S. | Co-Founder, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 17, 2021 **What do you like best about GoCD?** GoCD makes the continuous delivery just simple as we can have many agents within the same server also the pipelines are very easy to configure from the code first approach. So, I would highlight those as the best features. **What do you dislike about GoCD?** It had a slide with more learning curve to set up, I guess there should be an improved onboarding guide. **Recommendations to others considering GoCD:** I guess using GoCD would make the part configuring pipelines much easier than the other options. So, it's highly recommended. **What problems is GoCD solving and how is that benefiting you?** As software vendors, we are in a commitment where we need to manage and maintain our delivery pipeline as robust as possible, So our client will be happy with the seamless deployments to the prod. in that aspect, GoCD helps us to configure the needed pipelines. ### 3. GoCD is an indispensable part of our CI/CD strategy as well as our daily workflows. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tung V. | Senior Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 30, 2021 **What do you like best about GoCD?** Value Stream Map shows clearly the flows from code changes to production deployment **What do you dislike about GoCD?** New GoCD configs have to be merged into master branch to take effect & there is no way to dynamically set parameters like environment variables per build. **Recommendations to others considering GoCD:** GoCD is so easy to get started on. The documents are available & of high quality. **What problems is GoCD solving and how is that benefiting you?** We're using GoCD for basic QA like building, testing, analyzing Pull Requests, as well as to build release packages, deploy them to test environments as well as production. ### 4. Simple And Efficient, Nice to try **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Andrei Mihai R. | Co-Founder, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 29, 2021 **What do you like best about GoCD?** Simplicity, API, and of course the power behind concepts like pipeline, stage, jobs **What do you dislike about GoCD?** I can say that is anything I don't like, but the thing to consider is that the projects I've used are not very big. **Recommendations to others considering GoCD:** Keep Going and OpenSource, More Plugins **What problems is GoCD solving and how is that benefiting you?** CI/CD Processes. ### 5. Decent generic CICD solution **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Claudiu S. | Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 19, 2021 **What do you like best about GoCD?** - The templating was nice once one you got the hang of it - Triggers/DAG of pipelines is solid if you have to do massive deployments with the push of a button **What do you dislike about GoCD?** - API and templating support is pretty rough - doesn't have the best integration with Github, for which we had to use AWS CodeBuild for webhooks - UI/code setup for a pipeline is pretty complex for new people **What problems is GoCD solving and how is that benefiting you?** - monorepo CICD setup - multi-environment deployments with a single push of a button - templated setups ### 6. Decent generic and user friendly tool for CI/CD **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Saylee K. | Application Development Senior Analyst (DevOps), Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 01, 2021 **What do you like best about GoCD?** 1. Web interface is user-friendly. 2. Using templates is easy once you understand it. 3. You can use containers build agents. **What do you dislike about GoCD?** Nothing to dislike but areas of improvment 1. UI can be improved a bit. 2. Additional support of YAML template will help a lot. 3. Configuration is a bit rough to understand. **What problems is GoCD solving and how is that benefiting you?** - staged deployments as well as nightly builds on multiple environments. - Easy to configure new pipeline. - ### 7. Excellent **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** vijay c. | Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 25, 2021 **What do you like best about GoCD?** Managing the agents to build the application and performance **What do you dislike about GoCD?** UI part and handling the deployment configuration **What problems is GoCD solving and how is that benefiting you?** Easy to intigrate with third party tools ### 8. Good tool for CI/CD **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Telecommunications | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 22, 2021 **What do you like best about GoCD?** Web interface is looking good. You can organize well your builds using roles, environments, jobs, tasks, etc. . You can use containers build agents. **What do you dislike about GoCD?** Web interface needs improvements, doesn't run so good sometimes. Integration with docker containers and kubernetes should be improved. This integration process should be smoother. **What problems is GoCD solving and how is that benefiting you?** Improve build process, run builds in parallel. Organize better the build flow. ### 9. Recommended for begginers **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 16, 2021 **What do you like best about GoCD?** Visually way better compared to Jenkins and Travis. Intuitive. **What do you dislike about GoCD?** Not powerful as Jenkins in terms of plugins. Not easy setup as Jenkins. **Recommendations to others considering GoCD:** Compatibility is main problem especially if you try to run gocd agents on Windows. **What problems is GoCD solving and how is that benefiting you?** Running automated tests nightly (Selenium + Robot Framework). Easy to implement on Windows. ### 10. Cloud Engineer **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Entertainment | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 16, 2021 **What do you like best about GoCD?** Using template files as a source of truth for pipeline stage creation. **What do you dislike about GoCD?** Additional (YAML/JSON) template language support would be a nice to have **What problems is GoCD solving and how is that benefiting you?** Staged deployment (dev/prod). The Manual deployment stages/gate keeping are a great saver. ### 11. Great flexible product with pipelines as a first class feature **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mark C. | Technical Architect, Automotive, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 10, 2016 **What do you like best about GoCD?** I like that you can model whatever process you want, and that the fan in / fan out features allow you to run networks of processes in parallel in a predictable way. The dependency resolution allows you to run repeatable builds and reduce the amount of re-work you pipeline has to do. **What do you dislike about GoCD?** The server component is not architected to scale across multiple servers, meaning it can be quite slow at a very large scale. Configuration is tricky to manage, as it is not yet possible to just check in a file describing your build process like you can with Travis for example. **Recommendations to others considering GoCD:** Make sure you leverage templates. Don’t put your build code in the pipeline, use it to execute scripts in the project. Don’t use it for thousands of pipelines. Highly generalise and share your agents and avoid pipelines changing their state. Understand how to use secure environment variables and environments to maintain security. Don’t make everyone an admin. **What problems is GoCD solving and how is that benefiting you?** Continuous integration and continuous delivery of enterprise applications and infrastructure code. Sharing of artifacts between projects and highly templated deployment processes. ### 12. Good concept, flawed execution **Rating:** 1.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jeremy O. | CTO and Cofounder, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 25, 2016 **What do you like best about GoCD?** The product provides a ton of configurability, supports major dependencies and provides a reasonably good interface. Having built in test reporting was nice, and after some fiddling, it was easy to understand where everything was (build logs, test logs, etc). **What do you dislike about GoCD?** Pipelines, stages, jobs, tasks. Which can run concurrently? Which are run sequentially? It's fairly opaque, in particular from the naming (and even rendering) what exactly happens when and is overkill for many tasks. The way configuration is stored was extremely undesirable. I want simple text based configuration (YAML preferably) that I can version control and share easily. Not opaque XML that is largely configured through a web interface. Renaming even an existing task or something was more a matter of deleting the whole thing and recreating it, making for a pretty awful user experience. **What problems is GoCD solving and how is that benefiting you?** Same problem as any. Repeatable, configurable, builds. The way in which configuration is defined ended up being a deal-breaker for me. ### 13. Amazing experience, the truth pipeline! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Felipe C. | Desenvolvedor, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 22, 2016 **What do you like best about GoCD?** I loved the pipeline feature. It's amazing, incredibly useful and powerful. There's another killing feature that is pipeline templates, that makes my life a lot easier. **What do you dislike about GoCD?** I disliked the UI, but my colleagues have a divergent opinion about it. **Recommendations to others considering GoCD:** You must give a try about it. It's pipeline and template features are amazing, makes life a lot easier. **What problems is GoCD solving and how is that benefiting you?** I'm solving problems of continuous integration and continuous delivery, making it a lot easier, with less configuration. It's incredibly easy to add new pipelines, even the complex one, with a little effort. ### 14. After some crafting setup, really nice and easy to use! **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 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 GoCD?** Super easy to install and maintain. The UI is really clean and it makes really easy to visualise where you are in the pipeline. Also, the ability to extract templates from existing pipelines makes super-easy the addition of new projects. **What do you dislike about GoCD?** The setup was a little bit crafty: first we had to understand how the general view of the product (environments, builds, tasks), then we had to write some ad hoc scripts to achieve what we wanted. It would be nice to have some built-in templates for the most common type of applications -- as far as I am aware there aren't any at the moment. Also, the concept of environment didn't really fit the need of our team: we ended up using only one environment. Our pipeline was looking something like the following: build > test > publish > deploy-to-staging > testing-on-staging > (manual sign off) > deployment-to-prd Because of the structure of our pipeline, we could not manage to lock our pipeline as it was completing only when deploying to prd -- and obviously this wasn't happening for every candidate that was released. This caused us some headaches when 2 pipelines of the same project were building at the same time. **What problems is GoCD solving and how is that benefiting you?** We had the need of releasing frequently and quickly. We wanted to automate the test and release process as much as possible so that this was not time consuming for the dev team. Also, we wanted an infrastructure that a team of non-dev-ops could easily maintain. ### 15. A great, modern alternative to Jenkins **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Bence N. | Backend Engineer, Leisure, Travel & Tourism, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 12, 2016 **What do you like best about GoCD?** The clear overview of pipelines and their status on the web UI is the main reason we like Go CD. The materials, artifacts, and pipelines/jobs/tasks architecture is a very logical way to map a CD flow to. The REST API is also pretty powerful and makes automating things on Go CD a breeze. **What do you dislike about GoCD?** Configuration/provisioning is a bit difficult to automate. The config file Go CD uses has a few parts that are host-specific, so you can't just render the same config file on a different host to have a working installation. Updating the configuration file automatically with external tools is similarly rather difficult to do, so if you're looking to track changes to your workflow in your devops config repo (with Ansible, Puppet, or the like) you should be prepared for spending some time on that. Support for building GitHub pull requests is only available as a plugin and the software architecture was obviously not built with this use case in mind — for instance, you need to maintain separate pipelines for these builds, and your regular git builds. If this is your main use case, you might find TravisCI or CircleCI to be more fitting for you. Using Go CD with non-Java projects feels a bit off, it doesn't seem to support build tools natively for any other platform. **Recommendations to others considering GoCD:** Since we set up a Go CD server, an Ansible playbook has been published in the gocd-contrib/ansible-gocd GitHub repo. This makes initial setup way easier than before, so you can just install it and start evaluating the product in less than 10 minutes. **What problems is GoCD solving and how is that benefiting you?** Go CD takes care of automated tests for pull requests and automated deployments whenever a changeset is accepted. ### 16. Needs some minor improvements **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Prachi G. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 25, 2016 **What do you like best about GoCD?** Building pipelines is extremely direct and it permits to structure your works in a reusable and convincing way is anything but difficult to utilize it contrasting with jenkins, Have better backing. Also, the capacity to concentrate layouts from existing pipelines makes super-simple the expansion of new ventures. **What do you dislike about GoCD?** Support for building GitHub pull solicitations is just accessible as a module and the product engineering was clearly not worked on account of this utilization, for example, you have to keep up independent pipelines for these fabricates, and your normal git constructs. Configuration/provisioning is somewhat hard to mechanize. **What problems is GoCD solving and how is that benefiting you?** Building a microservice design at scale, utilizing GoCD permitted us to scale the groups up and deal with our 50+ administrations organizations basically. Deployment times slice from hours to minutes aggregate some online libraries on different stages. ### 17. Intuitive and easy to use **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rohan P. | Senior Product Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 27, 2016 **What do you like best about GoCD?** The User Experience, and the functionality provided. **What do you dislike about GoCD?** Takes some time to setup. Although become much better from previous versions. Not too many plugins present. **Recommendations to others considering GoCD:** Best CD software. Much better than Jenkins and Travis, etc. **What problems is GoCD solving and how is that benefiting you?** Continuous delivery and 1 step deployments. ### 18. Simple and Effective **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Bruno F. | Senior Software Engineer, Utilities, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 15, 2016 **What do you like best about GoCD?** Building pipelines is very straightforward and it allows to structure your builds in a reusable and compelling way **What do you dislike about GoCD?** It can be hard to get a grasp on how to structure pipeline dependencies and environment right **Recommendations to others considering GoCD:** If you are doing continuous delivery, this is the tool for you **What problems is GoCD solving and how is that benefiting you?** Building a microservice architecture at scale, using GoCD allowed us to scale the teams up and manage our 50+ services deployments in a simple way. ### 19. It is a good product. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Cristian V. | Senior Software Engineer, Computer Games, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 15, 2016 **What do you like best about GoCD?** is easy to use it comparing to jenkins, Have better support. **What do you dislike about GoCD?** sometimes the ui is not responsive. More help about how to configure the MacOSX and linux agents. For example on MacOSX you need to do some tricks to install java 1.8.0 and make it to be the default java after a startup. **Recommendations to others considering GoCD:** Will be usefull to override some parameters from a template. **What problems is GoCD solving and how is that benefiting you?** compile some online libraries on multiple platforms. ### 20. Great idea **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jason d. | Team Leader, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 15, 2016 **What do you like best about GoCD?** The pipeline concept. Really helps to visualise the steps of your CD pipeline, and the progress of each commit from push-to-master to deployed to production. **What do you dislike about GoCD?** Doesn't scale. With more concurrent users, making changes to the pipeline configuration becomes unbearably slow. Only use if you are a small team, or create an instance per small team. **Recommendations to others considering GoCD:** Don't have very large teams/departments using the same instance. **What problems is GoCD solving and how is that benefiting you?** Better continuous delivery. ### 21. The ultimate CD Tool **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Radoslav M. | Managing Director | DevOps and ALM Consultant, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 13, 2016 **What do you like best about GoCD?** I like the freedom it gives teams to craft end to end deployment pipelines! **What do you dislike about GoCD?** It's UI is little old but this doesn't bother me much, also its user management through a file is cumbersome. **What problems is GoCD solving and how is that benefiting you?** I built numerous deployment pipelines for couple of clients and no doubt that it plays nicely. I have been automating build, deploy and test workflows w/ ease. ### 22. Moving from Go CD back to Jenkins **Rating:** 2.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Wireless | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 28, 2016 **What do you like best about GoCD?** I wished Go CD would bring a new breath to CI but the interface is so messy and confusing that Jenkins is still better. **What do you dislike about GoCD?** Jenkins is by far more flexible that Go CD **What problems is GoCD solving and how is that benefiting you?** Build Automation - Docker and NodeJS ### 23. Review of Thought Work's GO Continuous Integration **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Prabhakaran T. | Technology Lead, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 05, 2015 **What do you like best about GoCD?** a. Mapping to Real World Concepts. Example : Environment: I can group all my servers into different buckets/environments namely DEV, QA, STAGE, PROD. This make organizing and assigning machines and pipelines easy. b. The User Interface is easy. c. Capability to deploy a script to multiple machine d. EASY to Learn, and provide transition to a team member. e. The support team is very very quick to respond. **What do you dislike about GoCD?** a. When the disk space is very very low (to store the GO artifacts), there is an option to delete the oldest artifacts. But, sometimes, I dont want to delete the older artifacts, rather I want the DEV-Trunk artifacts to be deleted. It would be nice to have an option to mention the GROUP name whose Artifacts will be deleted. Also, A email trigger would have been better if the disk space reduces to limit-X. b. My project has 100s of pipelines. On Dashboard each GROUP has a list of pipelines. I would like to expand and shrink the Group by double-clicking it. Rather now, I have scroll a lot to find pipelines. **Recommendations to others considering GoCD:** 1. I liked it, and I migrated an complex application from Jenkins to GO. My Development team enjoys it, and they cant believe this kind of continuous Integration can be achieved very quick 2. If you desire to achieve continuous Integration and Delivery, use this product. **What problems is GoCD solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are a Java shop, and we use GO to deploy 20 major applications involving more than 200 servers. The greatest benefit I see is, its UI an conceptualization is cleared designed in way, the knowledge transition of an application deployment is very very easy and smooth. ### 24. Recommended **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Darren S. | Principal Technical Consultant, Internet, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 08, 2015 **What do you like best about GoCD?** Easy, intuitive UI, easy to setup pipeline groups and pipelines and configure jobs **What do you dislike about GoCD?** Sometimes agents are very slow. Sometimes not clear what is happening **What problems is GoCD solving and how is that benefiting you?** CI/CD. Deployment times cut from hours to minutes - [View GoCD pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/gocd/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-05-15+08%3A02%3A50+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=579bebad-ea0e-42c6-a7f2-6fc8e7126ac7&secure%5Btoken%5D=34652fa660b801fb7ad7393212a774162b2750d1062f3c11cb901d47b4be283d&format=llm_user) ## GoCD Features **Functionality** - Deployment-Ready Staging - Integration - Extensible **Functionality** - Integrations - Extensibility - Test Customization **Management** - Processes and Workflow - Reporting - Automation **Management** - Automation - Processes and Workflow - Reporting **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 GoCD Alternatives - [Jenkins](https://www.g2.com/products/jenkins/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (548 reviews) - [TeamCity](https://www.g2.com/products/teamcity/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (87 reviews) - [Bamboo](https://www.g2.com/products/bamboo/reviews) - 4.1/5.0 (68 reviews)