Top Rated Semaphore Alternatives
I've been doing CI/CD for more than 15 years, helping teams start doing it, improve their means to do it, and in general making it *boring*. In other words, removing the drama and headaches that plague poor implementations and letting devs focus on other things. Semaphore v2 is hands-down the best CI product I've used to that end. It's designed by people who really are attuned to what makes good pipelines work and have made that their primary focus.
Semaphore v2 really shines on these points:
* Clutter-free UX and effective pipeline visualizations. Semaphore v1 was great, but didn't do so well here - v2 fixed those problems in a big way. Semaphore also obliterates tools like Jenkins and Bamboo in terms of UX. It's extremely intuitive and easy to navigate.
* Incredibly flexible platform, but without the open-ended bloat of Jenkins. Semaphore is opinionated to a degree, but it's opinionated in just the right ways so that you can't help but to end up with effective CI/CD using a very simple set of well-designed building blocks.
* Parallelism is a first class citizen. You can do pretty much anything you want in parallel, but define serial dependencies if you need them. You can also right-size with the appropriate compute resources at a VERY fine-grained level. All of this makes for a billing and activity model that is very fine-grained and useful - kudos on having excellent UX for these features too
* Easy-to-understand logs and job timings. There's always a desire to improve one's pipelines and this provides just the right information to do so. Rather than just show a raw txt dump (which you *can* get if you really want), logs are visually broken up into sections so you can see how long each part takes to run. You can also easily see which steps (if any) failed. I really do not like sifting through unparsed log output to try and find what broke - Semaphore has solved this problem very elegantly.
* Peerless debug facilities. The ability to attach to running or pristine build containers using a copy-paste terminal command is a killer feature and has saved me many hours of work.
* Useful utilities like the sem CLI and the Toolbox built-in to the platform. The Semaphore team anticipates what developers need, freeing us up to focus on more important things. Also helps keep our pipeline scripts short and sweet.
* Semaphore Secrets is excellent, from a feature point of view. Encryption by default, and we don't need to manage it. Having names of secrets in our pipelines rather than the encrypted secrets themselves is a plus.
* Effective strategy for making builds faster and more reliable by supporting a lot of caching patterns and download mirroring. The recent changes to avoid DockerHub throttling is a great example. Other tools often leave you to fend for yourself on these points and that takes time away from more useful pursuits
* Friction-free integration with Github for users and status checks. This was decent in Semaphore v1, and it's extremely good in v2.
* The support team is AWESOME. they respond quickly and almost always have an answer or a suggestion. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Semaphore v2 is still somewhat of a young product and as such there are a few rough spots in terms of features, but they are not nearly enough to make me reconsider using the product as it is today.
Specifically, I found the following things to be a bit rough:
* The artifact tool is a bit tricky, sometimes getting tripped up on certain filenames and not restoring a file to its original location. Fairly easy to work around, but more work than it should be.
* No high-level project health dashboard like we had in Semaphore v1 (or pretty much any tool). We can make dashboards, but they are all very commit-centric which doesn't work as well for managers and architects that just want to keep an eye on the basics
* The permissions model is very rudimentary, and this is a bit of a problem for more security-minded folks. For example, it's not possible to control access to secrets or who can manually deploy code to production. We rely on Github to keep us out of trouble, but I feel like this needs some more development.
* I'm not crazy about all secrets being global - the Semaphore v1 model (global + project secrets) was better IMO for managing large numbers of projects.
* It's not possible to parameterize manual runs. Though best case you don't need this sort of thing in a well-designed CI/CD pipeline, occasionally it's useful for things like hotfixes or rollbacks - exceptional circumstances.
* I can't seem to find a way to navigate the build history for a branch, i.e. scroll through a list of all the commits in order. This is a missing feature that other tools have
* If a pipeline is Stopped abnormally (i.e. neither Passes nor Failed), I have no information to tell me why. I probably should be able to see this info. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
180 out of 181 Total Reviews for Semaphore
Overall Review Sentiment for Semaphore
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It's cheap, it's easy to understand and the suppport team is quick to assist if you need help. We've previously used CircleCI which we found to be the opposite of all these. The UI is also modern and you easily get to what you want. The deployments feature is something I've been searching long and hard for, but haven't found anything else without severely impacting simplicity/ease-of-use. We use Semaphore CI every day, and perform 10+ releases a day to our environments and we have not had any problems yet. It was also very easy to get started as we just connected our GitHub Org, imported the relevant users and got to work on the pipeline files. That step was also a lot easier thanks to the graphical interface which guides you a little bit while you're getting used to the format. Honestly after trying GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Octopus, Jenkins, and more, this clearly stands out to me as the better option. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
I wish the UI would be a little bit faster at times. And that the dynamic template resolution step when you use deployment parameters was a little faster. We're trying to squeeze every bit of performance out of our CI and losing 10 seconds to this is a little frustrating. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The product integrates well into our CI/CD setup. The web UI stays out of your way and you can resort to CLI for everything you might need (besides analytics, I think). The ability to spin up the environments and ssh into it to debug potential issues makes it easy to spot issues. The documentation is fine, and above all - their support is human, swift and reliable. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
A feature that is in the pipeline (afaik) is to rerun indivdual steps instead of a whole workflow. This is obviously tricky (need to reset artifacts and cache etc) but would save some time on long flaky ci runs (that you should not have, but ... probably have). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Semaphore was easy to get started with and is one of the lower priced CI/CD platforms. When I need access to beta features or my usage triggered abuse detection, support was quick to respond and helpful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Semaphore doesn't offer large machine types currently, and Linux ARM (which I needed) was in closed beta. They let me into the beta, but it took several days because their support is on European business hours and I'm in the US. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Semaphore is an incredibly easy to use CI/CD platform. Integrating my Ruby on Rails applications to use it is always very easy to do.
Their platform has an incredibly good looking UI, and documentation is also very well written.
What makes Semaphore stand out from the crowd however is their customer support.
At one point at my current company we had some issue with our organization management; we contacted their customer care and they literally answered our email in 2 minutes and the problem was fixed in less than 1 5 minutes.
It can't get any better than this! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Sometimes they are slow to update the programming language versions in their OS images.
At one point the bump of a minor Ruby version took almost a week in their Ubuntu image and we couldn't upgrade our app without having the CI with the exact same Ruby version.
Also, lately they had some sort of bug in their platform that caused you to log out from Semaphore every day, and you thus you needed to log in back every morning. That was frustrating. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
I think SemaphoreCI is a great way to supervise CI/CD workflows. What is very useful for me is the SSH debugging feature helping with troubleshooting pipelines.
As well, the parameterized promotions make it easy to customize deployments, especially when working with multiple environments.
A good tool is also the test result reporting because it makes it easier to identify and address issues quickly which help a lot. In addition, I appreciate how fast are the pipelines and how the YAML configuration is useful to strikes a good balance between simplicity and flexibility! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Semaphore depends a lot on shell commands, which, I think might feel uncomfortable or intimidating to those new to scripting. Thus, I would say Semaphore is way more geared toward users who are already comfortable with the command line.
Also, I miss native integration with tools like Terraform or Pulumi. I believe they would be a nice addition for the one who are a lot invested in infrastructure-as-code. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Easy to use and integrate with our workflow. They have a good technical support team who are always ready to help. We had a few occations where we got stuck with some pipeline issues and the support team was always ready to help.
It supports multiple integrations and is easy to implement the CI/CD pipelines. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
- Cost. For teams which has mutiple development and deployment environments with a higher frequency of commit/deployments the cost will be a little high. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
My company has been using Semaphore for a few years now. In that time, we've aksed a few difficult questions, as we've had unusual requirements for our tech stack. The customer service team have been outstanding in coming back to us quickly and proactively with assistance and suggestions. The Semaphore service is solid and reasonably priced, and the setup is straightfoward. We use it pretty much all day every day. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
For anyone who has an unusual requirement, the docs don't always cover every situation. This is usually easy to fix with a single email to the excellent customer service Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The pricing model is pretty good which makes it competitive with the alternatives, the configuration for the pipelines is pretty powerful and there are rarely any outages or major problems.
The support is very polite and responds quickly and they treat reported bugs seriously.
The additional tooling for monitoring tests stability is quite nice and test reports make it easy to find which specs has failed, especially when running them in parallel.
It's clear that Semaphore continues investing in improving their product and adding new features, something that is often not the case with other CIs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The API is still in v1alpha and is a often cumbersome to use and requires tricks and polling to get right.
The Semaphore Classic had a concept of a "server", now there are only promotions so coordinating deployments of multiple projects to the same place can be tricky.
The UI design could use some work, requires lots of getting used to and important information is sometimes hidden in the clutter. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The support team is exceptional. They respond quickly, are incredibly knowledgeable, and clearly take the time to understand my issue in depth. Their advice is always practical and helpful, making the whole experience with Semaphore smooth and efficient. This level of support is rare and truly sets Semaphore apart. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Not much to dislike! It can sometimes be a bit tricky to navigate, especially if you're used to other CI tools. However, the documentation is thorough and helpful, and the excellent support team is always there to assist, which makes it easy to overcome any challenges. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Been using Sema 2.0 since their beta as CI/CD for all of our internal projects. I was dreading the YAML switch as commit push is required for any config change, but the upside is that every change is now tracked on revision control.
Uptime been great and their support team responds within 24 hours (because different TZ). Every issues that I created ticket for been resolved in timely manner. Support team is very knowledgeable about their product. More often than not they are able to recommend alternative ways of doing things once they understand my issues, and with minimal back and forth.
SSH Debug is a nice feature that allows you to recreate the pipeline and try to reproduce an issue or work out a fix from there. And the UI which appeals to Devs since it's simple and clean and it never looks broken after we added more pipelines or workflows. It's also designed such that accidental click wouldn't happen which is important for a production deploy pipeline. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Dropdown. YAML means no dropdown of options. To support multiple environments, you would have to create dedicated pipeline for each of them so UI might look redundant and clunky. But upside is that it avoids accidental mistake since selecting dropdown option is prone to human error. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
