Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Buildbot VS Concourse

Compare Buildbot VS Concourse and see what are their differences

Buildbot logo Buildbot

Python-based continuous integration testing framework

Concourse logo Concourse

Pipeline-based CI system written in Go
  • Buildbot Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-09-21
  • Concourse Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-07-31

Buildbot features and specs

  • Flexibility
    Buildbot supports a wide range of configurations and is highly adaptable to different environments and workflows.
  • Scalability
    It can handle multiple build processes simultaneously, making it suitable for large-scale continuous integration setups.
  • Open Source
    As an open-source project, Buildbot is free to use and has a community that can contribute to its development and maintenance.
  • Customizability
    The system allows for extensive customization through Python scripts, enabling users to tailor it to their specific needs.
  • Extensive Documentation
    Buildbot has thorough documentation that helps new users get started and allows advanced users to dive into more complex configurations.

Possible disadvantages of Buildbot

  • Steep Learning Curve
    Due to its flexibility and customization options, new users may find it challenging to set up and configure Buildbot initially.
  • Limited UI
    The user interface is not as polished or user-friendly as some other continuous integration tools, which can impact usability.
  • Dependency Management
    Managing dependencies can be cumbersome, particularly when incorporating different environments and complex workflows.
  • Performance Overhead
    The system can become resource-intensive, particularly with larger and more complex build environments, potentially leading to increased performance overhead.
  • Community Size
    The community, while active, is not as large as some other CI/CD tools, which might limit available support and third-party integrations.

Concourse features and specs

  • Simplicity and Consistency
    Concourse CI offers a simple and consistent UI/UX across different platforms. The interface is intuitive and designed to make it easy for users to visualize complex pipelines.
  • Containerized Builds
    Everything Concourse runs is within containers, ensuring isolated and reproducible builds. This method reduces the chances of environment-related issues during the deployment process.
  • Pipeline as Code
    Concourse utilizes a declarative approach to define pipelines using YAML files, which makes versioning and changing pipelines straightforward and trackable.
  • Scalability
    Concourse is highly scalable and can work well with very large pipelines and numerous concurrent builds, especially fitting for microservices architectures.
  • Dynamic Workflows
    It supports dynamic workflows through its resource/event-driven nature, allowing pipelines to react automatically to changes in resources.

Possible disadvantages of Concourse

  • Steeper Learning Curve
    New users might find Concourse's approach to pipeline as code and its unique abstractions more challenging to grasp initially compared to other CI/CD tools.
  • Limited Plugin Ecosystem
    Compared to other CI/CD platforms, Concourse has a more limited plugin ecosystem, which may require building custom resources for specific tasks that are readily available in other solutions.
  • Resource Intensity
    Due to its containerization strategy, Concourse can be resource-intensive, particularly if not appropriately managed or scaled.
  • Less Community Support
    Although active, the community around Concourse CI is smaller than those for more established CI/CD tools like Jenkins, which can result in fewer community-contributed plugins and resources.
  • Complex Configuration
    While powerful, the configuration files can become complex and hard to manage for large-scale deployments, requiring significant maintenance effort.

Buildbot videos

Craig Rodrigues - Migrating Python.org to Buildbot 9 and Python 3 - SF Python Meetup

Concourse videos

Concourse Smart Wheels - Review

More videos:

  • Review - Australian Golf Digest TV - Concourse CBM3 Golf Buggy
  • Review - THE GOLF SHOW CONCOURSE CBM3

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Buildbot and Concourse)
Continuous Integration
57 57%
43% 43
DevOps Tools
61 61%
39% 39
Continuous Deployment
64 64%
36% 36
Software Development
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Concourse should be more popular than Buildbot. It has been mentiond 22 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Buildbot mentions (9)

  • 10 open source tools that platform, SRE and DevOps engineers should consider in 2024.
    Buildbot is a versatile CI framework designed to automate all aspects of the software development cycle, enhancing efficiency and reliability. As an open-source platform, it is highly customizable, allowing teams to tailor the automation process to their specific needs. Buildbot excels in integrating various stages of development, from code integration, testing, to deployment, ensuring a seamless and coherent... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Continuos Integration and C++
    If you want more than the builtin CIs in Github and Gitlab, https://buildbot.net is the way. Source: about 2 years ago
  • What are the open source CI/CD tools for C++ (comparable to Ansible, Jenkins, etc.)?
    If you don't have one already integrated with your source control, buildbot is pretty nice and doesn't force you to use docker like most others. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Why Jenkins?
    Https://buildbot.net/ existed before Jenkins Hudson and was quite well known. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Which is the best CI/CD self-hosted open source tool?
    I have used python based CI tool buildbot which is a great tool but we want to move away from buildbot only because in some scenarios we want to compile low-level microseconds which are in c++ to a different architecture. Buildbot doesn't have such a feature. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
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Concourse mentions (22)

  • Tracking Supermarket Prices with Playwright
    > My CI of choice is [Concourse](https://concourse-ci.org/) which describes itself as "a continuous thing-doer". While it has a bit of a learning curve, I appreciate its declarative model for the pipelines and how it versions every single input to ensure reproducible builds as much as it can. What's the thought process behind using a CI server - which I thought is mainly for builds - for what essentially is a data... - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago
  • We built the fastest CI in the world. It failed
    > Imagine you live in a world where no part of the build has to repeat unless the changes actually impacted it. A world in which all builds happened with automatic parallelism. A world in which you could reproduce very reliably any part of the build on your laptop. That sounds similar to https://concourse-ci.org/ I quite like it, but it never seemed to gain traction outside of Cloud Foundry. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Ask HN: What do you use to run background jobs?
    I used Concourse[0] for a while. No real complaints, the visibility is nice but the functionality isn't anything new. [0] https://concourse-ci.org/. - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
  • How to host React/Next "Cheaply" with a global audience? (NGO needs help)
    We run https://concourse-ci.org/ on our own hardware at our office. (as a side note, running your own hardware, you realise just how abysmally slow most cloud servers are.). Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Cicada - Build CI pipelines using TypeScript
    We use https://concourse-ci.org/ at the moment and have been reasonably happy with it, however it only has support for linux containers at the moment, no windows containers. (MacOS doesn't have a containers primitive yet unfortunately). Source: about 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Buildbot and Concourse, you can also consider the following products

Jenkins - Jenkins is an open-source continuous integration server with 300+ plugins to support all kinds of software development

Travis CI - Simple, flexible, trustworthy CI/CD tools. Join hundreds of thousands who define tests and deployments in minutes, then scale up simply with parallel or multi-environment builds using Travis CI’s precision syntax—all with the developer in mind.

Drone.io - Continuous Integration For GitHub and Bitbucket That Monitors Your code For Bugs

CircleCI - CircleCI gives web developers powerful Continuous Integration and Deployment with easy setup and maintenance.

Codeship - Codeship is a fast and secure hosted Continuous Delivery platform that scales with your needs.

JetBrains TeamCity - TeamCity is a continuous integration and build management system.