On the other hand there is Bamboo from Atlassian. https://www.atlassian.com/software/bamboo
I really don't understand this mentality of there is no better tools when there are better tools than jenkins and they've been around for a while.
Bamboo on the other hand is IMO the worst of the commercial CI tools by far and where I work has gone down for us the most. Atlassian itself doesn't appear to be investing in it much anymore judging by the slow pace of development in recent years and at their most recent conference, you can hardly find it mentioned or see much presence for it anywhere.
In all the CI systems I've used though, there has not been one that I haven't encountered some major difficulties with.
Beyond that, anything to do with build automation for a large number of users always quickly becomes a support & maintenance quagmire. Users frequently want to install a new (barely maintained) plugin to solve a problem they have, complex interactions lead to difficult to understand failure modes that require time consuming investigations ("your CI tool is the problem and broke my build" ... "No, your build is broken" ...).
First you checkout the project from the repo and it just works, doesn't matter GIT, SVN or whatever. How many plugins does it take to checkout a project in jenkins? Is there even a git plugin working nowadays?
Then, you build the project. If it's any of C# or Java for example, the ant/maven/sln/nuget files are detected automatically, just click next and it's built. Does jenkins even understand what is a requirements.txt? Hint: It's not a bash script.
The JVM and the Visual Studio are detected automatically on all the build slaves and the project is already building in the right places. If you want to aim for specific tool versions, there are presets variables on all hosts to filter where to build and to use in build scripts so paths are always right. How is the build matrix plugin in Jenkins lately? Broken as usual?
The project is built, or is it building? It's easy to tell because there is a clear colored status icon and the estimated time to completion is displayed. Teamcity offers that out of the box for maybe 15 years now. Well, jenkins finally got a progress bar too a couple years ago. I guess I'm defeated, Jenkins caught up on basic core functionality only a decade late, I can't justify to pay for working and polished tools anymore. Well, I hope our sysadmin will install the Extra Status Icon Plugin or we'll have to live without the big colored circles next to the build.
I think you’re not appreciating and misrepresenting the complexity and power that comes with these solutions.
And actually, you can get quite far with the free TeamCity license of three build agents and 100 build configs. I’m also fairly sure that Jetbrains would take kindly to license requests from open-source projects and academia.
- Templates
Gitlab has something called templates but it's a very different thing. In Gitlab, a template is used to bootstrap a project, but that's it. In TeamCity a template is attached to a project such that if you change the template, changes are applied to all projects that inherit from the template. Each project can override any settings or build steps it got from the template, without losing the association to other settings. A project can have multiple templates attached to control orthogonal aspects of its behavior. From a template, you can see what projects inherit from it, and you can freely detach and attach to a different template. It makes managing a large number of projects with similar configs, that all evolve at somewhat different rates really easy.
- Build results
Teamcity has very good integration with xUnit and code coverage tools to quickly see test results and coverage as part of a build. Gitlab recently got better at this (it can now at least parse xUnit results), but you can still only see test results in the merge request view. TeamCity can also do things like track a metric over time and fail a build if it drops (i.e. PR builds should fail if code coverage drops more than X %). TeamCity also supports adding custom tabs to the build page so that you can attach reports generated by the build easily viewable in the UI (vs in Gitlab where you have to download the artifact and then open it to view)
- Overall view of runner status
It's very easy in TeamCity to see the build queue, and an estimate of when your build will run, and how long it's expected to take based on past builds.
-Dashboard
For me it's easier in TeamCity to see the overall status of deployments to a set of environments (i.e. what's on dev/stage/prod) that might span multiple source code repos. At a glance I can see what changes are pending for each environment, etc. In Gitlab things are too tied to a single repo or a single environment, and the pages tend to present either too much or too little information. Also, in TeamCity I can configure my own dashboard to see all of the stuff I care about and hide other things, all in one place.
- System wide configs
There are some settings that apply to the whole system (repository urls, etc). There's no easy way in Gitlab to have system wide settings, they have to be defined at the group or repository level. In TeamCity, you can configure things at any level, and then override at lower levels.
- Extensibility
TeamCity supports plugins. I know this can lead to the Jenkins problem of too many plugin versions, etc, but in TeamCity you tend to use far less plugins, and the plugin APIs have been super stable (I've written plugins against TeamCity 8 which is 4 major versions old and they work fine on the latest). It's really nice to be able to write a plugin that can perform common behavior and have it easily apply across projects and be nicely integrated into the UI.
To me, overall Gitlab CI seems useful for simple things, but overall it's 70% of the way to being something that could replace TeamCity.
- Templates
We actually have done a lot here recently, we've improved includes so that they have a lot more flexibility (https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/#include), and have even refactored our own Auto DevOps implementation to take advantage of this: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/topics/autodevops/#using-componen.... In this way, you can have included behaviors across your projects that can then be updated in bulk.
- Build results
We are planning on adding testing results over time in our vision for this year, thank you for confirming this is important from your point of view. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/1020
- Overall view of runner status
We did recently add pipeline info to the operations dashboard (https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/operations_dashboard/), which I know isn't exactly what you're looking for here but we are making progress in this direction and recognize the gap.
- Dashboard
The next improvement we're making to that operations dashboard is adding environments. You can see the in-progress issue here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/3713
- System wide configs
This can be achieved by using includes to set the variables, which is admittedly a workaround. We do have an open issue (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/3897) to implement instance level variables that would solve this.
- Extensibility
This is an interesting one because Plugins are, at least in my opinion, what makes Jenkins a mess to use in reality and believe me, I've managed plenty of Jenkins instances in my career with lots of "cool" plugins that do something great, at least while they work. It is one of our values that we play well with others, though, so I'd be curious to work with you to understand specifically what you'd like to be able to make GitLab do that can't be done through your .gitlab-ci.yml. Our goal is that you should never be blocked, or really have to jump through hoops, but still not have to be dependent on a lot of your own code or third party plugins.
I'll give you a couple of examples of use cases for plugins:
We have an artifact repo that can store NPM, Python and other artifacts (Nexus if you're interested). I wrote a plugin for TeamCity that can grab artifacts from a build and upload them to the repository. Obviously this can be done in a script, but there are a couple of things that make doing it in a plugin nice:
- You can set it up as a reusable build feature that can be inherited from templates (i.e. all builds of a particular type publish artifacts to Nexus)
- You can get nice UI support. The plugin contributes a tab to the build page that links to the artifacts in Nexus.
- The plugin can tie in to the build cleanup process, and remove the artifacts from the repository when the build is cleaned up. This is useful for snapshot/temporary artifacts that you want to publish so people can test with, but have automatically removed later.
Another example of where plugins have proved useful is influencing build triggering: we have some things that happen in the build server, and then other stuff happens outside of the build server. When all that completes, we then want to kick off another process in the build server (that sounds abstract - think an external deploy process runs, and once the deploy stabilizes you kick off QA jobs). In TeamCity you can write a plugin that keeps builds in the queue until the plugin reports that they are ready to run.
While plugins aren't the first tool I reach for when looking at how to provide reusable functionality in a build server, I have written several plugins for both Jenkins and TeamCity. Overall, I don't think Jenkins/TeamCity's model of having plugins run in-process is a good one, and it leads to most of the problems people have with them (although TeamCity is much better here: Jenkins basically exposes most of its guts to plugins which makes keeping the API stable virtually impossible, while TeamCity has APIs specifically designed for plugins that they've been able to keep stable very effectively) A model where a plugin was just a Docker container that communicated with the build server through some defined APIs, combined with some way for it to attach UI elements to a build that could then call back into the plugin would be much nicer. This seems to be more like what Drone is doing, but haven't played around a lot with that.
I think Gitlab has a strong philosophy of wanting to build out everything that anyone will ever need, all nicely integrated, and that's a great ideal. I think in practice, it's REALLY hard to be all things to all people. People have existing systems and/or weird use cases that it just doesn't make sense to handle all of, and plugins are a useful tool in addressing that.
You may want to try a C#, java, python and a go projects to see the differences, with slaves on Windows and Linux. There are some pretty tight integrations for some of these.
* Broken base Ubuntu images being recommended by Atlassian as the default for agent Image configuration, only to be fixed to a usable state months later;
* Being generally years behind other CI tools, even the traditional ones;
* Data exports corrupting themselves despite apparently succeeding, blocking migrations after upgrades or server changes;
* The official documentation somewhere recommending copying across password hashes directly for setting up new admin for a migration, but I can't find this anymore so they've hopefully improved the process and documentation for this;
* A bug in an earlier version in which a strange combination of error cases in an Elastic Bamboo image configuration could spam EC2 instances in a constant loop, which we thankfully spotted before it ate through our AWS bill;
* No clear messaging from Atlassian about how the future of Bamboo compares to Pipelines. The official line seems to be that Bamboo is for highly custom setups who want to host their CI themselves, but you get the impression from to the slow pace of development that they're slowly dropping it in favour of Pipelines. I'd rather they be honest about it if that is the case.
Those are just the problems I can think of from the top of my head, anyway.