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Comment by nerdjon | Hacker News Reader

I feel bad for the employees.

Does anyone... actually like CircleCI?

Last time I used it, it just felt way too opinionated. Then they introduced their way of standardizing jobs with templates or something (it has been a while) and for some reason made the decision that any templates had to be public instead of private for the first version (which was completely backwards).

Personally for me I always lean towards Jenkins just because I can do whatever I want with it. But baring that I feel like I would end up either going with something my git hosted provides (like GitHub actions) or something my cloud provider has (like AWS CodeBuild).

Is there something I am missing? Looking at the pricing it isn't exactly cheap either.

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I'm a former CircleCI employee (I left the company almost a year ago), and I generally really liked the product.

It's probably a little overpriced, and I wish they had just focused on "doing the same thing but better" rather than spending a lot of efforts on value-add gimmicks, but I do like the core product very much.

> Does anyone... actually like CircleCI?

It's a weird feeling where they once felt like a reprieve from all the PITA "enterprise" stuff, but now they're that PITA kinda-poorly-minded "SaaS" stuff, which sucks compared to... a Microsoft product?

It's kinda obvious in retrospect. Enterprise became SaaS faster than SaaS could become enterprise.

I would rather cut off a finger than ever use Jenkins again. What a piece of shit. Design from the 90s, maintained by people who can't code and don't care about users, trying to turd-polish it into new tech stacks to justify themselves to the sad old enterprises invested in them.

Circle is decent. It has all the functionality you wish was built into Jenkins, but way easier and better, with no maintenance cost or insane languages to learn. It has some drawbacks but nothing you can't work around. Orbs work fine, they also can be private. Circle's self hosted functionality is... bizarrely stupidly designed, but essentially works.

I would much rather use Drone.io for any new paid CI project. The best functionality, literally as simple as possible, with cloud native design. Extensible, flawless as self-hosted, does everything you need.

I used to love CircleCI then they broke all my CI jobs when they deprecated their "Convenience image". Rather than continue to maintain CircleCI jobs and pay them for the pleasure I am just migrating to GH actions. It is painful. They have good lock in.

I set up CircleCI at a previous company because it was "easy" and neither GitHub Actions nor AWS CodeBuild existed yet. Eventually, we outgrew it (memory issues, I think?) and set up our own Jenkins instance. This would've been back in 2016, so I'm sure it's better now.

No not really.

I think it is one of the few providers that offers Apple runners. Not much else besides that. We switched to self hosted teamcity and 1/3 our build time with a 6 month payback.

> Last time I used it, it just felt way too opinionated.

That's exactly what I like about it.

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