An agile team that operates without continuous integration is like driving a race car in first gear. Your team can still make it to the finish line, but deploying to market will happen at a speed that works against best agile development methods and against your business goals.
Continuous integration was made for agile lifecycles. What team doesn’t want to deploy smaller code changes and catch more defects earlier in the development process? What team wouldn’t benefit from reducing backlog, increasing transparency and launching stronger product quality?
Continuous integration puts you back in the driver’s seat, and the leading CI tools accelerate how quickly error-free products move to the market.
Simply put, CI tools are designed to streamline continuous integration at your organization. Continuous integration tools allow your team to perpetually integrate code into a repository that’s single shared and easy to access, allowing multiple developers to contribute and collaborate at a rapid pace. Successful companies integrate CI tools in order to provide greater efficiently within their process and deploy stronger software products to market.
That’s up to your team to decide. Reviewing hundreds of continuous integration tools can quickly become overwhelming, so make sure to ask yourself these questions when choosing the right CI tool for your team:
To help you out, we did our homework. After researching all available continuous integration tools, we recommend checking out these options.
As one of the smartest CI tools on the market, Buddy is designed to lower the entry threshold to DevOps. This software uses delivery pipelines to build, test and deploy applications and websites by applying code from GitLab, GitHub and Bitbucket. Buddy’s pipelines feature 100+ ready-to-apply actions that can be structured for your team’s needs.
Price: Free–$200/month
As one of the open-source continuous integration tools on the market, Jenkins builds and tests software projects continuously. This Java-based, cross-platform tool provides real-time testing and reporting on isolated changes in a larger code base, making it easy for developers to integrate changes to the projects as well as locate and resolve defects in the code.
Price: Free
Bamboo automates the management of software application releases. As one of the CI tools that creates a continuous pipeline, Bamboo covers building and functional testing, tagging releases, assigning versions and deploying new versions on production. This tool can trigger builds based on changes detected in the repository and push notifications from Bitbucket.
Price: $10–$1,270/remote agent
TeamCity helps teams build and deploy a variety of projects. The automatic framework and configuration of this tool can perform code coverage and analysis while avoiding code duplication. As one of the continuous integration tools that supports cloud integration, TeamCity is compatible with today’s technologies including Microsoft Azure and VMware. This tool supports flexible user management, user roles assignments, multiple user authentication pathways and provides a log for all user actions.
Price: Free–$299/license
Unlike most CI tools on the market, GitLab is a suite of tools that aids teams in managing different aspects of the software development lifecycle. GitLab enables users to trigger builds, run tests and deploy code with each push. The core product of this tool features a web-based Git repository manager that allows users to track issues, report analytics and use a wiki.
Price: Free–$99 per user/month
CodeShip is considered one of the most powerful continuous integration tools that automates the development and deployment workflow. This platform triggers an automated workflow by simply pushing to the repository. CodeShip supports both early and automatic software releases across multiple environments.
Price: Free–$49/month
BuildBot, being one of the open-source software development CI tools on the market, automates test cycles to validate code changes before automatically rebuilding and testing the tree upon every change. This Python-based CI framework tool is widely used for many software projects because it provides parallel execution of jobs across a variety of platforms.
Price: Free
Your team should receive all of the benefits of continuous integration instantly when the right CI tool is in place, including:
If your team is new to continuous integration, test out the free CI tools available first in order to establish your continuous integration processes. Once familiar with CI/CD best practices, you’ll have more confidence in choosing the best continuous integration tool so that your team receives the most value.
There’s a hefty lift in applying continuous integration into your processes. Receive the guidance you need by partnering with a QA services provider like QASource. Our team of engineers and testers have years of experience with continuous integration with expertise in CI tools best practices. Consult our experts so that your team can enjoy a seamless transition of your team to support stronger software product deployments. Get a free quote today.