--- title: Semaphore Reviews meta_title: 'Semaphore Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 197 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Semaphore works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.7 review_count: 197 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-07-17' parent_category: name: CI/CD Tools url: https://www.g2.com/categories/ci-cd-tools --- # Semaphore Reviews **Vendor:** Semaphore **Category:** [Continuous Integration Tools](https://www.g2.com/categories/continuous-integration) **Average Rating:** 4.7/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 197 ## About Semaphore We’re excited to announce that Semaphore’s core CI/CD platform is officially open source. Now, you can explore, tweak, and contribute to the same production-grade code that’s powered your builds and deployments—all under the Apache 2.0 license. Find the GitHub repo here: https://github.com/semaphoreio/semaphore Semaphore CI/CD helps product teams ship software faster, with quality and security. 🚀 Features Blazing-fast CI/CD – Get your builds & deployments done in record time. Simple yet powerful – YAML-based config, parallel execution, and more! Scales with you – From solo developers to massive engineering teams. Built for the modern cloud – Works seamlessly with containers, Kubernetes, and multi-cloud environments. ## Semaphore Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users commend the **swift and reliable customer support** of Semaphore, highlighting their initiative in resolving issues effectively. (12 reviews) - Users value the **fast and helpful support** that provides tailored solutions and clear documentation. (8 reviews) - Users value the **reliable performance** of Semaphore, significantly enhancing developer productivity and reducing CI/CD times. (6 reviews) - Users find Semaphore to be **easy to use** , with a straightforward setup and responsive support enhancing their experience. (5 reviews) - Users appreciate the **easy integrations** of Semaphore, facilitating seamless feature integration and boosting developer productivity. (5 reviews) - Users find the **easy setup** of Semaphore refreshing, allowing quick integration and efficient start for projects. (5 reviews) - Automation (4 reviews) - Deployment (4 reviews) - Quality Improvement (4 reviews) - Response Time (4 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users find **difficult navigation** challenging at times, especially when adapting to Semaphore compared to other CI tools. (3 reviews) - Users express concerns about **poor customer support** , particularly regarding response times and time zone differences. (3 reviews) - Users find the **documentation confusing** , often struggling to navigate advanced configuration options for complex CI workflows. (3 reviews) - Users experience **slow performance** with Semaphore, especially during agent responses and deployment template resolutions. (3 reviews) - Users find the **lack of permission management** frustrating, often relying on workarounds to navigate Semaphore's complexities. (2 reviews) - Difficult Configuration (2 reviews) - Navigation Difficulty (2 reviews) - Bug Issues (1 reviews) - Cloud Limitations (1 reviews) - Users find the **complexity of YAML configuration** and UI design challenging, especially for newcomers to scripting. (1 reviews) ## Semaphore Reviews ### 1. Fast and easy to maintain **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Oliver K. | Kadetade - Letom svetom za pár eur, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 22, 2020 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** It's really fast. We used CircleCI and I have feelings Semaphore is more than twice faster for less money. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** Sometimes UI freeze or I have to reload the page. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** We gave more check jobs to our system and auto promotion for deploy to testing environment. It's very easy to add new jobs and incredible fast, so our flow doesn't take a lot of minutes to end. So people doesn't have to wait long time to see if their work passed all checks ### 2. That's a powerful and modern tool for CI/CD operations **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 02, 2020 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** They have no limitation and we only pay as much as we use. That's good for our business. Also they can provide Mac OS X and we can use it super-easy. These are critical points for us. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** They should add more customization options and rich trigger mechanisms for workflows **Recommendations to others considering Semaphore:** Firstly you can read documentation. Generally that's work and I like it. But if you don't find answer to your questions, you should talk with support. I hope they'll reply asap. They'll amazing fast for this topic. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** We need to automate deliver pipelines and it's related with Mac OS X. So we search correct solution for this problem. Semaphore's solution is very good for this perspective. ### 3. Best CI product I’ve used to date **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Martin B. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 25, 2020 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Really like the graphical representation of CI pipeline. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** Can’t really think of anything on Semaphore that I’ve come across that I dislike. I did dislike how the online editor would re-format YAML and break lines across multiple lines, but after I raised this with support the behaviour was changed within a couple of hours. Can’t ask for more than that! **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** We’re using Semaphore to build, lint, test, and deploy our application. ### 4. Great CI solution for all size companies **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Fernando S. | Senior Full Stack Developer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 22, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** handle all the projects CI strategies easy to use and integrate with Github so each time a team member publish some code we can know if they pass the test coverage **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** Some tests are pretty slow to run specially with Ruby on Rails rspec gem **Recommendations to others considering Semaphore:** I suggest use semaphore for your CI strategy for backend applications, is easy to integrate with Github repository so, you can check code coverage while you are pushing your code to your Github repository. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** Source code test coverage, all changes delivered by team members are tested before to integrate to the main repository branch ### 5. Humans behind a reliable, fast and flexible CI service **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Clément J. | CEO, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 13, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Flexibility while maintaining a relative simplicity, very good speed, very competitive pricing by the second, reliability (no random build errors), awesome support (fast replies, precise answers) and a large support of various technologies. Now there's a very explicit graphical editor too ! Also, Semaphore CI is not a Silicon Valley startup fed by cash from investors. That's a European team ! And that means a lot to us. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** Semaphore 2.0 was very rough when launched (slow UI, missing features, imperfect latest Ruby versions support, insufficient documentation). We came back 10 months later and enjoyed a much more complete version, but there are still some parts of the UI that – I think – could benefit from a UI improvement (jobs logs readability, shortcuts to access certains details). **Recommendations to others considering Semaphore:** Dig deep, ask questions, explore and give yourself time to understand all the subtle settings you can have in Semaphore. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** We get a CI environment that matches exactly the environment we use in production, and that is very reliable. So we never get a deployment that did not get caught in CI. We get very good run speed, which makes our feedback loop much better. That's probably the best speed there is (and speed means cheaper bills when paying by the second). We pay *exactly* for what we use, and we get the machines we really need. We don't pay by seat, we don't have a minimum per month. When stuck, support always answers and take our remarks into account. That's rare. ### 6. Simple and Powerfull CI tool **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vigen S. | Lead Machine Learning Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 31, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Pay-per-use model, speed, powerful parallelization. Great team that response very quickly to all sorts of problems. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** As it is hosted cloud product, it would be great to have 24/7 support team that could resolve problems once they are reported event at night. When you run you own CI tool you could fix it yourself if needed. But in case of cloud hosted product you need someone who could fix the issues right away. This will make it easier to connivence IT security department to allow full scale move to Semaphore. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** Speed & Flexibility! In comparison with subscription based CI tools I have greater flexibility in sense scaling up and down, without paying extra fees. ### 7. Super easy to setup and modify **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** David Z. | Engineering Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 17, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Documentation on the semaphore.yml file to codify the configuration is very good. It was very trivial to set up our tests to run in parallel and not have to repeat a lot of setup tasks. Integrating with our Github to build on branches and pull requests was simple and just worked. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** Nothing so far, it gets the job done and is easy to maintain as we add more tasks. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** We set up Semaphore to replace a Jenkins server we had configured to automatically run our test suite. The time to configure Semaphore was drastically quicker than setting up Jenkins, the UI is much nicer, and regular engineers can understand Semaphore and contribute. ### 8. Sane defaults, incomplete docs **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Josua S. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 17, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Semaphore 1 was crazily easy to use. Even though Semaphore 2 gives me much more flexility (which I want) I sometimes miss this simplicity. But compared to CircleCi for example the defaults are still pretty sane and the pricing ok. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** - The Semaphore 1 GUI was much better than the one in Semaphore 2. I really miss the distinctive view between builds and deployments. - The Semaphore 1 docs were exhaustive. The Semaphore 2 docs are not. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** Well actually I'm solving more problems by myself now with Semaphore 2 than with Semaphore 1. This whole devops movement brings a lot of weight down to the programmers. But to the point: Semaphore is our CI/CD ### 9. Fast and easy to use **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rafael A. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 15, 2020 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Good documentation, UI easy to use and it's really easy understanding what is happening even though you're not a tech person **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** Sometimes I get some random errors. So, when I run again this same errors doesn't happen again and everything works fine **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** Semaphore CI becomes more fast to deploy my applications and remove the necessity to do this manually saving my time ### 10. Great product, great service **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Judy C. | Full Stack Developer, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 02, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** It's fast, robust, and they're continuously making updates to the product. If you make a feature request, there's a good chance you may see it live in a few months. Big fan of the "WYSIWYG" config setup - it's easy to onboard someone who has no experience with CI/CD to start implementing changes to your pipeline. They also have great service. All of my inquiries are answered within 24 hours, and their staff is quite friendly and understanding. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** A lot of features we were looking for are now live on Semaphore 2.0, but I believe there's still room for improvement in terms of their GUI. It's improved a lot since half a year ago, but it could use some more love. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** All of our applications are using Semaphore 2.0 for CI/CD. It's easy to setup, fast, reliable, and secure. The greatest benefit for us was that we could see the workflow of ALL of our applications in one place. Prior to Semaphore, we used multiple different services, and it was a lot of overhead to manage. Having a centralized service that takes care of all your integration and deployment needs makes your day way more efficient. ### 11. Great product with a great team behind it **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Benjamin S. | Tech Lead (API), Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 21, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Semaphore CI is very easy to setup and yet a very complete CI toolkit. The offer is well designed and priced, with a honest free plan. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** Nothing! When Semaphore CI 2 came out and I was missing the (very non-critical) fearure of build badges, I emailed the support. They didn't forget and got back to me more 8 months later when the badges finally got implemented. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** Automated build, release and deployment pipelines; I now spend 0 time manually building, testing and deploying. ### 12. Simple, fast and flexible CI **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** André B. | Developer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 14, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Semaphore 2.0 delivers great flexibility with its new pipelines and promotions approach! It allowed us to create totally different build and deploy strategies for development and production. We have tried different CIs and none allowed the flexible combinations between building blocks like semaphore 2.0. Not to mention their CLI which allows creative ways to monitor and interact with your building server. It's a refreshing approach to test automation and continuous deployment! **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** Documentation could be better but what the documentation lacks their customer support gives in double. It can get pricy if you are experiencing flaky failures! **Recommendations to others considering Semaphore:** If you have any trouble or difficulty during implementation just ask, they are quick and helpful. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have written and combined different building blocks like code scan, unit testing, integration testing, etc.. between different pipelines (development and production) in a very intuitive way, reduced effort and repetition. After a green build, we have multiple promotions available that allow a developer to seamlessly push his code to multiple staging servers at the same time, manually or automatically. Their CLI was also great and allowed us to create scripts which will monitor failures and rebuild the pipelines automatically. Great service! ### 13. Flawless support, never bugged out or down for maintenance **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Peter K. | Senior Software Engineer, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 02, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** We integrated it with slack do failing commits does not escape us. Its fast. Setting up the CI for new repositories is easy **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** If you want to run the newest version on ruby, you can do that with custom commands in the setup, but it takes a little longer doing it that way. Mostly the newest version of ruby becomes available as pre-installed after a few weeks **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** Running the hole tests suite on my computer takes too long and halts the development process. So I just let semaphore do it ### 14. Excellent CI/CD service for private projects **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chris F. | Software Developer, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 08, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** I really like that semaphore has several popular database services and other application dependencies already installed, configured, and accessible on the instances. It makes it super easy to get tests running for my apps. I also really like the direction Semaphore is going with their configuration-driven CI/CD in Semaphore 2.0. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** I would like it if there was a more clear upgrade path to Semaphore 2.0 from projects on Semaphore classic. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** We're using Semaphore for all of our in-house continuous integration and continuous deployment needs. We've been easily able to test and deploy all of our apps, which use a variety of test frameworks, depend on an array of different services, and run in many deployment configurations. ### 15. Must use! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Abhinav J. | Web Developer Internship, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 03, 2020 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Intuitive UI & UX. Like the way, it represents all errors & builds. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** There's nothing exactly I dislike about Semaphore. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** CI & CD. Unit Test coverage ### 16. Excellent for iOS CI-CD setup **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sagar K. | Mobile Application Developer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 31, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Integration with GitHub, Latest Xcode build support, gem cacheing, ease of setting up environment variables, supporting local-keychain access for appStore deployment, automation with Fastlane & Fabric, AppStore deployment made easy. Thanks to parallel job execution, I can now test and build together. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** Each time instance is starting as a fresh system. 10 to 15 mins are taken for installing CocoaPods and CocoaPods repository to install dependencies which I don't like the most. If we can cache cocoa-pods like we cache gems, it would be best. Also, Mac System on Semaphore CI are bit slow. I've same config which you've, but here it takes 20 mins to generate build using same set of commands but on CI, it takes more than 45 mins :( At the same time, I also would like to say that build for android is not yet available. It would be great add on feature. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** CI-CD. Upon every git-push, build is generated & flag (for code is buildable or not) is shown. This really helps us identify while reviewing pull request on Github. ### 17. The fastest CI/CD tool **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Trần M. | QA engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 16, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** My company use Semaphore for CI/CD. I manage a project to run automation testing in CI/CD flow and integration with GitHub. I used Jerkins, gitlabCI before but Semaphore CI is the fastest, easy to set up and run. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** I do not use all functions of Semaphore. It's ok for now. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** Run my smoke tests to verify code that merges on staging. I can manage the quality of the product before releasing on production. ### 18. We've been using Semaphore for a long time **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Lukas O. | CTO, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 27, 2020 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Responsive support Handles our needs well Good API Load balancing across threads Semaphore 2.0 **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** Outside our VPCs so that can make certain actions tricky On Semaphore 1.0, it was hard to debug problems (this is much better in 2.0) Conditional logic in semaphore.yml could be simplified **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** Does most of our heavy lifting continuous integration Outsourced a tricky infrastructure component ### 19. Powerful but affordable CI/CD **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Hrvoje M. | Staff Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 24, 2020 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Ability to define pipelines inside yml file and keep them in your code repository. Flexibility in pipeline design and various features that make devops life easier. Also, they have great support. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** Since semaphore 2.0 is in early stages, they can have occasional performance issues. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have benefits of keeping pipeline configuration inside code, easy and simple way to maintain them. ### 20. Most reliable CI tool I've used **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Myles C. | Mr, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 16, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Semaphore allowed me to easily setup test automation for a project I was working on and was cheaper and more reliable than some of the competition I had tried (Codeship/circleCI). The UI is more intuitive and easy to follow while keeping it clean and surfacing the information that I need. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** It achieves everything I need. I only use the v1 of semaphore and haven't used the v2 which seems to have a lot more flexibility and power (however the setup looks more complicated) **Recommendations to others considering Semaphore:** I don't know v2, but v1 of Semaphore is great if you have a Rails app. The test suite is fast, it scales well and the ui is very intuitive. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** I need a CI tool that was cost efficient and easy to use. As a solo developer on a project I wanted something that I could get up and running and wouldn't have to spend ages tinkering with and would just work. ### 21. Easy to use, performant CI tool **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Travis R. | Senior Engineer, Internet, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 06, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Setup/configuration is very flexible but not difficult. Support has been extremely helpful whenever I've had a problem or just a question. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** I really can't think of any downsides to Semaphore. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use Semaphore for test automation and continuous deployment. ### 22. The fastest on market **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Anthony M. | CTO, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 14, 2020 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** CPU performance are almost 2x the competitors' one, without queue time. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** Platform other than Linux aren't free for open-source projects. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** I was looking for the CI/CD tools with the best perfs, Semaphore with their dedicated instances did it. ### 23. Excellent service with great support at a low price! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Taylor F. | Lead Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 10, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Semaphore provides a solid, fast service that compares favorably to competitors like Travis CI and Circle CI. Support has been exceptional in the rare cases that we've needed it. Pricing, especially of the new Semaphore 2.0 service, is very low. The rollout of their new Semaphore 2.0 service has been great, and I like that they're continuing to support Semaphore Classic in the meantime. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** It's clear that Semaphore 2.0 is a new service, so it doesn't have all the features you may expect. However it is actively being worked on, and new features show up regularly. For example, it was missing as "re-run this build" button for a while, but now it has that! My only real gripe is that they do not offer free service for open-source projects like some of their competitors do. **Recommendations to others considering Semaphore:** If you only need a Linux-based testing environment, it's hard to do better than Semaphore. (If you need Windows or MacOS machines, you'll have to look elsewhere.) Semaphore's documentation is excellent, their machines are fast, and their support is responsive and knowledgable. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** We run all of our continuous integration (CI) on Semaphore. Doing so has enabled us to avoid dealing with complicated CI infrastructure like Jenkins. We also do some continuous delivery (CD) from Semaphore. That makes deploys completely painless and possible to do through a web-based UI. Both tests and deploys have been fast enough that we haven't wasted any time wondering why our test infrastructure is slow. ### 24. Great service, ease of configuration **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Stefano A. | Senior Freelance Developer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 23, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** I've used also CircleCI with its version 2 config files (which is quite tedious to setup), and I have to say that if I only could, I would definitely convert all my projects to work on Semaphore. (Sadly, sometimes the client doesn't make this an option, doesn't care how loud my voice becomes.) **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** Nothing, really. Although I've only used it for Continuous Integration builds, I can't testify for Continuous Deployment. But it seems very straightforward too. **Recommendations to others considering Semaphore:** If you're not convinced, try to set up a simple CI solution using Circle CI vers. 2 **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** CI for Rails apps. Basically, it allows me to add another full run of the whole test suite on an actual running environment. This has allowed me to spot countless times errors or flaws that were impossible to replicate during a local test run on the dev machine. ### 25. Powerful, intuitive, and effective **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Daniel M. | Full-stack Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 01, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** To be honest, what I like most about Semaphore is that I get to use the product without "using" it. We're a small startup, and after our initial learning gap was overcome, it's been seamlessly integrated into our build process. We have build pipelines to multiple products in multiple environments, and for these preset environments, the build process is as easy as committing and pushing to our source repo. Semaphore runs the tests, and as long as tests complete successfully, it's deployed. Post-commit, we're notified in Slack. Now, that's for the predefined branches. When we have a feature branch we want to test out, for example, on development servers, simply select the branch in Semaphore and deploy manually. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** There are errors that are extremely common in our environment (AWS). These errors are not abstracted at all, so when a deployment fails, there's no top-level visibility as to why it failed. You'll have to dig into the log-files (which are immediately available when you select the failed deploy) to figure out what went wrong. Not a "bad thing" but not a "good thing" either. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have instituted business processes that define when a feature / bug-fix branch can be merged into our various environments. Semaphore makes everything past that process seamless. If we do our job, Semaphore rolls things out, and all that's required is for us to verify that it deployed correctly. ### 26. Easy to use and reliable CI **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ion B. | Mr, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 02, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Seamless GitHub integration. Works as expected with my Ruby on Rails applications. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** With older versions of RSpec and Capybara-Webkit (maximum versions supported by Ruby on Rails 3) the buid process may hang up unexpectedly and never finish. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am very satisfied by the fast, reliable, multithreaded CI builds made with Semaphore for all of my Ruby on Rails applications. ### 27. Fast, Easy and Ready and very Simple interface **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mohsin K. | Typo3 Developer, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 03, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** I really like the interface and of its really simple to execute your tasks. I like the Controll it provides user to accomplish tasks as they want. The Deployments Process is really simple and easy then the others in the marker right now. The Speed of the Test that i run throught this is amazingly fast. Customer support is outstandingly fast. Really easy to setup any big project by in just a few clicks. dont need to write 100's of line of codes to fullfill our CI/CD requirements. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** Nothing till now, because of, for now, it fits on my needs. **Recommendations to others considering Semaphore:** I would like to recommand this to others who really in need of a simple solution related to automated deployment of the Projects. in combination with the CI. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** Running tests of my code just before the deployment of the code to live. mostly the PHP Projects. ### 28. Configuration-as-code on a pay-per-use model? Sign me up! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Craig Michael T. | Head of Engineering, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 06, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Pay-per-use was a must for our use case, and the fact that we could describe our entire build pipeline in code alongside the code base itself was a massive advantage over our existing CodeBuild implementation. Goodbye undocumented, manual build setups, hello reproducible, documented CI! **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** Promotions could use some work, specifically the ability to lock down certain promotions using the Conditions DSL. Though, this is on their long-term road map which is great! **Recommendations to others considering Semaphore:** Build matrices are your best friend if you're wanting parallel builds with varying environments. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** We're testing out a MonoRepo approach to developing our software and Semaphore's configuration-as-code + build matrices made this a piece of cake. ### 29. Very good and quick service **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Hidde W. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 14, 2020 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** - Good stability - Great service - Many features **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** - In some cases a very new product, with some strange quirks **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** - Automated testing and deployment - Improved integration testing with Docker ### 30. Great Experience **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** John P. | Senior Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 13, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Very consistent. Very easy to setup. I like the feeling that things just work. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** I wish there was an easier way to clear cache other than shelling in to an instance and running the CLI command. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** Since switching to Semaphore from another service, we have realized how little time we spend thinking about Semaphore because it's reliable. ### 31. Fast and simple ci/cd solution. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mikias A. | Mr, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 02, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** The fact that it very simple to set up is what I like most. The docs are also clear and cover most of the use cases you might need and the option to change your machine for different jobs is very nice too. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** It does not have an option to disable building for certain branches. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** Time to production has improved and safe of mind with all the tests for each commit. ### 32. Fast, flexible and easy to use **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Richard V. | CTO, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 26, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Semaphore 2 has one of the fastest, uncluttered and most to-the-point web interfaces of all CI products I've used. When switching from Semaphore 1 I was a bit sceptical about the requirement of describing the build process, but in the end this has allowed me to implement extra checks, such as code scanning listing to our CI process. There is a good balance between ease of use and flexibility. Support has been exceptional. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** Getting started with a new project for the first time can be a bit daring, but fortunately most of the use cases are well documented. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** CI/CD platform that integrates with our GitHub and Heroku workflow. ### 33. Semaphore 2.0 is the fastest CI/CD tool I've used yet **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jay D. | Senior Software Developer, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 28, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Configuration of Semaphore 2.0 is a breeze. It's entirely file based (rather than a web GUI) using YAML syntax and you keep your configuration in source control. The syntax is relatively simple (but powerful) and well documented. I was able to setup our configuration & optimize it in less than half a day. While many tools these days use this type of file-based configuration, our previous tool did not. With our previous tool (another SaaS product competitor), we were able to run 4 pipelines in parallel for $400/month. At best, we'd get 8-12 minute test/build times (end to end), with a number of 15-16 minute outliers (for basically identical codebases, very small changes). Once we switched to Semaphore, we were able to split our tests up across 8 pipelines, and use smaller VM's. We immediately saw a couple benefits: - So far, our pricing is at less than 1/2 of what it was using our previous provider - Our build times are consistently < 3 minutes end to end (compared to 8-16+ minutes) The number of pipelines wasn't really the primary differentiator; I actually tried running between 8-16 pipelines on at least two (2) competitors. Whatever system Semaphore has setup for caching (bundle/node/etc) & provisioning VM's is super fast. Competitor tools would take 2-3 minutes or longer to restore a VM & run bundle. With Semaphore 2.0 our entire test suite is generally complete in under 3 minutes. In addition to the competitors still being slower with more lanes, to run 8 parallel pipelines with the competitor tools would cost us a lot more than we wanted to budget. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** There isn't much to dislike with Semaphore 2.0, but the web UI may be the area that will see the most improvement in upcoming months. It's clear Semaphore chose an API-first approach with Semaphore 2.0, but the web UI is functional for most of what you'll need to do day to day, aside from configuration. I've watched as the web UI has improved even over the past 2 months we've been using it. **Recommendations to others considering Semaphore:** Semaphore 2.0 has a free credit that lets you give it a pretty substantial run-through. Definitely give the trial a go. We were able to use a basic workflow, with 3 blocks (bundle across 1 job, lint across 3 jobs, tests across 8 jobs) to cut our testing time significantly **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** We're using Semaphore 2.0 with a Ruby on Rails application primarily for test automation as part of our CI/CD pipeline. ### 34. Awesome tool **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Yura O. | CEO, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 16, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** I like the first version of Semaphore platform the most. It has nice UI, easy to configure for Rails projects hosted on github, it is fast and serving our purposes really well. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** 1 - I find team / project access management the weakest part of the platform. 2 - I'd like more straightforward way to access Activity Monitor page to see what is currently running **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** We're running tests for all of the projects that we're working on. Deployment is also managed via Semaphore. Sometimes people forget they can do that manually by running capistrano from local machine! ### 35. Fast and flexible CI **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** James A. | Director, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 25, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Semaphore runs builds faster than any other CI system I've tried in the past, and seems very flexible in terms of pipeline structure. I also really love being able to debug builds via SSH. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** The flip side of the pipeline flexibility is that it takes a bit of trial and error to get the pipeline running. But once that's done, it's all good. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** Semaphore helps reassure me that all the branches and pull requests for my application are stable and running well, and means I can spend less time checking them, and get them deployed faster. ### 36. Great tool for test automation **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Diego D. | CTO & Founder of Leevia, Marketing and Advertising, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 07, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Semaphore works very well, our application is a ruby on rails dockerized app and tests are executed with rspec. We also love the integration with GitHub and Slack! **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** The price could be high for small team, would be great to have a plan dedicated to small team or start-ups. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use Semaphore to execute automated tests in cloud, to have a common place where execute automated tests for the whole team and be notified for a test failure before to execute a deploy or close a pull request. ### 37. Semaphoreci2 is great **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 12, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** It's cheap, It's simple, It does support multiple environnements. We can test, build and deploy for the web, iOS and Android. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** As of today it is lacking some functionnalities, and I would like an even deeper Github integration. (for exemple to re trigger something, directly from a PR comment) **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** I standardized the way we test and deploy apps. Before semaphore we were using differents products. They were more expensive than semaphore and less simple. ### 38. Quick setup, powerful CI, nice support **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Cristi D. | Senior Software Engineer & Team Lead, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 05, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** We used to have an in house solution for CI/CD which required plenty of time for maintenance and setup. With semaphore CI you can have the CI setup in minutes. I find the cost reasonable for the power it provides. The seamless integration with github and heroku. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** Nothing yet. We've been quite happy since moving to semaphoreCI **Recommendations to others considering Semaphore:** Give it a try. I was reluctant to move away from our solution but don't regret the decision one minute **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** We're using it to automatically run our test suites and staging deployments for Ruby on Rails apps. ### 39. Excellent tool! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Human Resources | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 17, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Good documentation, excellent interface, nice support. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** Some previous versions wasn't so good as the current one. **Recommendations to others considering Semaphore:** Can really speed up your work and product quality. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** Fast shipping and easy to automate environment processes. ### 40. Easy and powerful **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 18, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** easy yml and integration with github great support and sem cli makes it more than fast **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** at the time I got in was really in beta so not a lot of stuff to see, but the changes in time compensated **Recommendations to others considering Semaphore:** Go test it out **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** CI tests ### 41. The fastest CI/CD solution out there **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nemanja A. | Senior Software Developer Team Lead, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 19, 2018 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** I like how Semaphore streamlines my deployment process. Taking care about multiple environments is easier than ever, and I've tried a couple of other popular CI/CD solutions. Whenever a code update is pushed to git repository it will automatically run tests on it and deploy it if the deployment is configured on a branch to which the code is pushed, and configuring it doesn't take more than a couple of minutes.. The UI is so simple, my mom could even use it :) And it's blazing fast! **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** Sometimes the UI glitches (doesn't update or shows duplicate in-progress builds), but it doesn't really affect my workflow - it can make one confused for the first couple of times, but then you realize it's nothing that a simple page refresh can't solve. **Recommendations to others considering Semaphore:** Give it a try.- it doesn't cost anything (to try... or to use moderately) **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** My company completely relies on Semaphore for building, testing and deploying code to development, staging and production environments for all our clients. I'm not sweating before the deployments (to production) anymore! ### 42. One of the best CI/CD platforms **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Alvin Y. | Senior Full Stack Engineer, Computer Software, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 16, 2018 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Semaphore is one of the best CI/CD platforms in terms of: 1. Ease of use. 2. Pricing. 3. Support. 4. Their tremendous effort on pushing forward best practices. Semaphore developers understand what you need from a CI/CD platform, and they keep improving it. Often they release new features I need before I requested them. This is particularly true if you look at their newly released 2.0 version. I'm a big believer of total infrastructure-as-code (IaC). Including CI/CD itself, they need to be part of IaC. With Semaphore (particularly 2.0), you can archive near-100% IaC. A strong competitor is AWS CodeBuild. However, to use it effectively, it requires a large amount of prior work and the learning curve is quite steep. Please forgive my bias that I think the majority of the CI/CD users would not have time or resources to do CI/CD nicely with AWS CodeBuild. Semaphore CI will save you much time, in other words, much money. My primary requirement of a CI/CD tool is that it has to support both Git Flow and non-Git Flow workflows. Because when it comes to managing deployment, I have a lot more deployment environments than just "master" and "develop". I also need to support rolling back quickly and efficiently for each environment. I can achieve all that with Semaphore. The quality of most of Semaphore CI’s competitors is nowhere near Semaphore’s. One of them that I tried stated that it supports BitBucket on their homepage, but the BitBucket integration was broken utterly. Also, it was left broken for weeks. I wouldn't bother trying it anymore. Some competitors might seem to be more popular. However, I think this is an example that more popular tools are not necessarily better. ​ I was blown away on numerous occasions by their technical support. Last time, they helped me to resolve an issue similar to kernel panic inside a virtual machine in my CD environment in Semaphore (and yes nested VM because I was building a VM image for later use). Ervin, one of their engineers, provided a workaround to me in less than 24 hours. Then they went on to actually address the root cause. This is impressive because I think the issue I was encountering was very low-level and hard to debug. Remember we are talking about things like kernel panic here, not many developers would have any clues. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** Really nothing. If I have to say one, it would be the limitation that you can only run your builds in a single region which is in Germany. **Recommendations to others considering Semaphore:** I really don't see many other real competitors unless your CI/CD platform is just a toy. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** To reach near-100% infrastructure-as-code. ### 43. Semaphore provides the features we need in a no-nonsense package **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Arts and Crafts | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 25, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Semaphore has been great since day one. Their pricing structure is transparent and simple, and their documentation got me up and running in no time. When that documentation wasn't enough, an email to their support got an answer in less than 24 hours and answered my question straight to the point. I also appreciated their live video tutorial on YouTube, which confirmed some of the things I read in the docs and taught me some new ones. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** For the moment about a month in, there's nothing I dislike about Semaphore. One thing I wish they had is Pull Request support, but they already answered me that it would be coming soon, and provided a workaround meanwhile. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** Semaphore helps me and my team during our code review process by giving us an extra confidence that the code we push is running properly. ### 44. Used for quality assurance **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Broadcast Media | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 29, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Check media files without having to play them **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** Can be difficult to understand until you get used to it **Recommendations to others considering Semaphore:** You can get into settings to color coordinate the analysis results **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** I learned a lot about video files using this tool ### 45. Simple, Powerful, and Great Support **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sebastian S. | Founding Team Member, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 10, 2018 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** * Speedy builds, easy parallelization * Simple, easy to configure environment, especially via 'Secrets' * Easy, high performance UI * Fast customer support that is very helpful **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** No problems with this service so far. Suggestions for future development would be to use YAML config so Semaphore configuration can be version controlled - but that has recently been launched with Semaphore 2.0 I believe. **Recommendations to others considering Semaphore:** Most CI services have easy trial policies - if you sign up to a few, I think it is quite likely users will notice that Semaphore has best-in-class performance. We were trialling multiple providers and decided on Semaphore because the builds were faster than everyone else! **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have large containers that typically take a long time to build on other services. Semaphore offers a serious speedup over most competitors in terms of raw build time. ### 46. Fastest CI ever **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 21, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Semaphore is much simpler and easy to integrate compared to other CI tools. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** I didn't found any issues with semaphore till now. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** Using semaphore for test automation and continuous deployment. ### 47. The fastest available **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 28, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** The platform is the fastest available. I tried many different platforms for CI and on all my benchmarks this was the one with the best results. In some cases performing within half the time of others. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** It is, and seems to have always been, quite simple. It lack some interface features. But luckily the support team is very helpful. I expect this downside to disappear in the near future. **Recommendations to others considering Semaphore:** Watch for usage costs. Being on demand is nice and all, but if you have high demand, like us, it can be very costly. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** Contiuous Integration is key to provide feedback to the development team and also enable the continuous Delivery door. ### 48. Great experience **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 11, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** I like that Semaphore is simple & you dont need write long yml files and configs, as a front end developers its hard to me, but i can write bash scripts, which Semaphore ci/cd understand well. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** I dont know why but when you run docker and inside it run jest tests, jest console log output is white&black not color. But if you run jest by itseft outside docker with --color flag it will print colorful text **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** Testing every commit that i made is a great but finding tool ### 49. SemaphoreCI makes CI simple **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Shaun M. | Co-Founder & Technical Director, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 12, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Platform: - Quick to set up. - Simple to use. - Builds are fast. Support: - Responds promptly. **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** Wondering why I didn't come across it sooner. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** Build: - Passes our test suite. - Shows build status in repo. - Prevents merging a failed test. Deployment: - Auto-deployment on specific branch. ### 50. Quick to resolve issues **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Telecommunications | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 16, 2019 **What do you like best about Semaphore?** Well functioning platform, quick to fix things, good support **What do you dislike about Semaphore?** I imagine it could get pricey if you have a large team and need a lot of CI done. But at that point you should probably be able to afford it. They have a decent free tier that's quite hard to overshoot for single developers / smaller projects. **What problems is Semaphore solving and how is that benefiting you?** Code quality, etc ## Semaphore Discussions - [What is Semaphore used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-semaphore-used-for) - [What are two kinds of semaphores?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-are-two-kinds-of-semaphores) - [What is semaphore explain with example?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-semaphore-explain-with-example) - [What is semaphore and its function?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-semaphore-and-its-function) - [What are semaphores uses?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-are-semaphores-uses) - [View Semaphore pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/semaphore/reviews?page=3§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-21+18%3A01%3A09+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=a0f79dd5-cd88-4426-8f07-96ede1f7c1d5&secure%5Btoken%5D=7cba1054a9fd6b35dfef6186b5693f92c8fe11692e8585bb4320d52dd5178084&format=llm_user) ## Semaphore Integrations - [BrowserStack](https://www.g2.com/products/browserstack/reviews) - [Codecov](https://www.g2.com/products/codecov/reviews) - [Cypress](https://www.g2.com/products/cypress/reviews) - [GitHub](https://www.g2.com/products/github/reviews) - [Google Cloud Console](https://www.g2.com/products/google-cloud-console/reviews) - [Knapsack Pro](https://www.g2.com/products/knapsack-pro/reviews) - [Rollbar](https://www.g2.com/products/rollbar/reviews) - [Salesforce Heroku](https://www.g2.com/products/salesforce-heroku/reviews) ## Semaphore Features **Functionality** - Deployment-Ready Staging - Integration - Extensible **Management** - Configuration Management - Access Control - Orchestration **Functionality** - Integrations - Extensibility - Test Customization **Functionality ** - Test Feedback - Test History - Customization - Test Variety **Management** - Processes and Workflow - Reporting - Automation **Functionality** - Automation - Integrations - Extensibility **Management** - Automation - Processes and Workflow - Reporting **Automation** - Organization - Reliability - Thoroughness **Processes** - Pipeline Control - Workflow Visualization - Continuous Deployment **Agentic AI - Automation Testing** - Autonomous Task Execution - Natural Language Interaction - Proactive Assistance **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 Semaphore Alternatives - [CircleCI](https://www.g2.com/products/circleci/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (499 reviews) - [Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform](https://www.g2.com/products/red-hat-ansible-automation-platform/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (369 reviews) - [Jenkins](https://www.g2.com/products/jenkins/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (557 reviews)