Continuous Delivery Pipelines: GoCD vs. Jenkins

Though I like and follow some brilliant minds in ThoughtWorks, I think they took too long to Open Source Go. With +900 plug-ins, supportive community and being used in different fields (I use Jenkins in bioinformatics and for software development, but there are people using in robotics, testing medical devices) I don't see why I would use GoCD.

> Jenkins pipelines are somewhat simplistic and comparing the respective visualizations is in fact misleading (Jenkins top, GoCD bottom):

The diagram displayed in the post is misleading. That is the view created by the pipeline plug-in. While this plug-in works great, unfortunately it doesn't play well with other plug-ins (e.g.: build flow [1]). My bioinformatics pipeline has several build steps (tasks in GoCD?) that invoke several different tools.

Each build step is usually provided by a different plug-in. And some jobs run in parallel too (with the Build Flow Plug-in). There are parts of the pipeline that run in a batch server (PBS Torque server) using a plug-in built by our team. Build flow provides a different pipeline view [2], but it is quite easy to create another plug-in to display pipelines in a different way.

Maybe this same pipeline could be created with GoCD, but at the time it was created (2010) we had to use Open Source tools for this. So I find it easier to port features from GoCD to Jenkins, rather than re-create plug-ins to use the pipeline feature in GoCD.

[1] https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-14302 [2] https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/download/attachments/66847200/Ca...