Comment by CamouflagedKiwi
7 days ago
I've used CircleCI quite a bit in the past; it was pretty good. Feels tough for them to compete with GHA though when you're getting GHA credits for free with your code hosting.
I used Travis rather longer ago, it was not great. Circle was a massive step forward. I don't know if they have improved it since but it only felt useful for very simplistic workflows, as soon as you needed anything complex (including any software that didn't come out of the box) you were in a really awkward place.
CircleCI made great steps the last few years, f.e. to better support proper DRY working, supporting OPA policies-as-code, VSCode extensions with "dry-run" options.
For some examples of more advanced usecases take a look: https://circleci.com/blog/platform-toolkit/
Disclaimer: i work for CircleCI.
To be clear, I do think CircleCI is a better product than GHA. I just think there's a lot of air sucked out of the room by GHA being available 'for free' and out of the box.
Also, honestly, I don't care about any of those features. The main thing I want is a CI system that is fast and customisable and that I don't have to spend a lot of time debugging. I think CircleCI is pretty decent in that regard (the "rerun with SSH" thing is way better than anything else I've seen) but it doesn't seem to be getting any better over time (e.g. caching is still very primitive and coarse-grained).
I had a considerably better time with CircleCI in the past than with Github Actions currently. It feels much more like a complete product rather than a tacked on mess, I hate how disproportionately we count running cost just because we have numbers for it (vs. DX and velocity which are hard to measure and impossible to predict)
I mean, they do have a free plan with 6,000 minutes