Top 3 Shippable alternatives in 2021
On February 1st, 2021, Shippable announced their service shutdown 2 years following their acquisition by JFrog. This leaves Shippable customers with 3 months to find a new solution. Here are the top 3 Shippable alternatives in 2021 for cloud-based web apps.
Disclaimer: this review based on personal use/opinion and online reviews by live customers in February 2021.
GitHub Actions is an API first introduced in 2018, but became generally available to the CI/CD world in November 2019 after popular request.
Pros: GitHub Actions' killer feature is being able to duplicate GitHub workflows easily through templates for every pull request. GitHub Actions wins on overall ease of setup - if you're already using GitHub as your main version control provider it's an easy install and it supports a wide variety of tech stacks. Given the generous free resources it provides, it's a great place to get started with CI if you have a smaller test suite.
Cons: As of February 2021, its main drawback is the lack of native caching that requires more hacky workarounds that your team will have to create. On the support side, immediate support or extensive documentation is not currently available.
2. webapp.io
webapp.io was first created as a research project in 2018 by computer scientist Colin Chartier after seeing the frustration caused by the complex nature of traditional CI among his co-workers.
Pros: webapp.io killer feature is that their configuration files (affectionately named "layerfiles" given their syntax similarity to dockerfiles) spins up on-demand staging servers. These full stack staging servers can be used for code reviews, E2E testing and Docker Hub specific workflows. webapp.io wins overall on Docker-focused experience. In addition, their Slack-based support makes it easy to get dedicated help.
Cons: As of February 2021, the main drawback of webapp.io is that it currently does not support MacOS or Windows VMs.
3. CircleCI
CircleCI was founded in 2011 by Paul Biggar and Allen Rohner as a Continuous Integration platform after graduating from the 500 Startups program.
Pros: CircleCI's killer feature is the introduction of CircleCI Orbs, an exciting feature that saves time when writing YAML files. In addition, they support MacOS, a big differentiator and selling point if this is core to your current technology stack. CircleCI wins overall on technology stack support, with their landing page message being "build anything on CircleCI". As a company, they've invested heavily into supporting your whole stack on premise and on cloud.
Cons: As of February 2021, the main drawback of CircleCI is that the docker layer caching support is slightly outdated for some users.