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Comment by andrew_ | Hacker News Reader

Circle CI has been steadily taking marketshare away from Travis for many, many years. And in my personal experience, mostly because of Travis' slow pace of improvement. Using containers for testing blows away performance on Travis for comparable tasks. Travis had made some improvements this last year to their workflows, configuration, and platform, but too little too late. My experience in dealing with their customer service (we did have a paid plan for some time) and customer feedback (feature requests, pleas for fixes, etc) was also quite poor.

I'd moved to Circle CI two years ago, and the only tasks/projects of mine still running on Travis are those which are deprecated, in suspended animation, or abandoned. For myself and my immediate peers, Travis is obsolete, and they did it to themselves. With Azure pipelines now a thing (and also far superior to Travis) I see another slow, slow death of a pioneering service.

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> Travis is obsolete, and they did it to themselves.

This is sad, but the conclusion I have come to over the last 3-4 years as well. It was anybody's market 4 years ago, but through a sustained pace I think CircleCI have out-executed Travis consistently.

The thing I find interesting is that, looking at Semaphore CI who used to be far behind Travis, they are now biting at the heels of CircleCI with their 2.0 iteration. From what I understand they are not venture backed and are a smaller team, and yet their product is starting to look like a real competitor. To me this says that Travis just failed to execute well enough, rather than Circle having more money (although that helps).

Thanks for mentioning Semaphore, cofounder here. Yes, we’re 100% bootstrapped and in this for the long haul. It’s really all about execution. We built 2.0 in a timeframe in which we’d previously ship one or two features. Of course years of domain experience help, but everyone from Fred Brooks to DHH is right — adding more people won’t help build a better product faster.

I love Semaphore. I remember getting a handwritten personal note and an informal invitation to visit in Novi Sad a few years ago. While that doesn’t say anything about the “tech” it does show that they are real people that care deeply about users — even fairly insignificant ones like me. That it’s a bootstrapped company with a really great product made me happy as well.

I wouldn't mind trying out Semaphore for some open source projects. On the community open source page [1], from what I understand, you offer a free service, but the pricing page [2] says that it's not free yet?

[1]: https://semaphoreci.com/community/open-source

[2]: https://semaphoreci.com/pricing

If you don't mind logs and project pages not being publicly visible, you can start using the Semaphore 2.0 free tier with your open source project. If you run out of credits send a support request and we'll increase.

That community page is outdated and referring to Semaphore Classic (1.0) and 2.0 will be getting proper open source support soon.

Semaphore v1 has been great and very simple to use. Huge fan of those guys. Bootstrapped, extremely friendly, helpful and competent. We’ve been using them since 2012.

v2 definitely looks promising but they’re not sunsetting v1. Lots of respect for that as well.

Edit: at the risk of sounding like a fanboy (I guess I am), they also grandfathered us indefinitely on the same price plan we signed. Not many companies do that sadly.

I’ve had a similar experience. It seems like Travis rested on its past reputation for a long time and Circle slowly eroded their lead with a much better platform.

Circle was way ahead of Travis in their docker implementation. The Travis docker stuff always felt like a hack.

Once I started moving more projects to Circle, most of the developers on our team were much happier on Circle.

In case anyone from Circle CI reads here: I haven't had the need for a hosted CI so far so this is all new to me. I looked at the Circle CI homepage and they have a video on the homepage "See how Circle CI works". Try watching that without sound. It's useless. I'm not sure why anyone would create a video like that.

This is another homepage that already assumes that everyone knows what it does and is no help to people unfamiliar with it.

While I agree with you that the homepage doesn't do a good job explaining what Circle CI is to someone unfamiliar with CI, your criticism of the video doesn't make much sense to me. The video has a voice-over explaining what Circle CI does, and includes subtitles for when you don't have sound.

That's true. But if all the information is contained in the text. Why not make it a text I can read at my own pace instead of forcing me to watch it through a video at no additional benefit.

https://circleci.com/product/#how-it-works

For what it's worth, this video is an ad - I have seen it (at least the first five seconds of it) at least 20 times prior to youtube videos [1].

So I guess they wanted a YouTube add, so it needed video and once they had paid to make that said hey why not stick it on our homepage? Or something like that.

It could have also gone the other way: as a useful video describing how things works, and then it got a second life as an ad - but the former path seems more likely.

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[1] I'm not sure why they are targeting me so heavily, but I see this ad more than any other, by a large margin.

I wonder if this kind of thing happens so often in software because we get fixated an idea of how a problem should be solved and lose sight of solving the problem. Better solutions that don't dovetail with our model of the world get discounted until the evidence is overwhelming.

Does Circle-CI offers Mac runner for public/open-source projects? This is the reason I haven't been able to migrate from Travis to Circle-CI for all my projects, I have an open-source Electron module that I need to test cross platform so Travis covers Linux and Mac and AppVeyor for Windows.

I was able to acquire that ability by emailing them and explaining the open source need. They were quite reasonable.

It's worth noting that Travis also supports windows builds now. Which to me is a HUGE value proposition over CircleCI.

It's a decent point, but if I need Windows based testing, I'll get myself a free Azure Pipeline account and get Windows in CI from the same folks.

> Does Circle-CI offers Mac runner for public/open-source projects

Yes, but you have to ask them to enable the thing. I used them for ArchMac before I migrated to GitLab. I am contemplating moving back to GitHub and CircleCI, unless I can get my hand on some decent hardware again to run the CI builds.

On a tangent and just because these discussions almost never happen; Jfrog has been my most terrible support experience. We have an OSS and paid plan and I expect 4+ days before hearing back from them. If/when are repos experience an issue we would be dead in the water. I have even tried calling their emergency contact number with no answer or call-back.

Ouch, that's bad, shouldn't happen and usually doesn't happen. Ping me in DMs on Twitter (@jbaruch) or by email (jbaruch@jfrog.com) and I'll investigate what happened.

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