Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

CircleCI VS Composer

Compare CircleCI VS Composer and see what are their differences

Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.

CircleCI logo CircleCI

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

Composer logo Composer

Composer is a tool for dependency management in PHP.
  • CircleCI Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-05
  • Composer Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-19

CircleCI

$ Details
-
Release Date
2011 January
Startup details
Country
United States
State
California
Founder(s)
Allen Rohner
Employees
500 - 999

CircleCI features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    CircleCI offers a user-friendly interface and straightforward configuration, making it accessible for both beginners and experienced users.
  • Scalability
    CircleCI easily scales with your project, allowing for flexible resource allocation and handling multiple workflows in parallel.
  • Extensive Integrations
    CircleCI supports a wide range of integrations with various tools and services like GitHub, Bitbucket, Docker, and Slack, enabling seamless workflows.
  • Speed and Performance
    With features like advanced caching, dependency management, and parallelism, CircleCI enables faster builds and quicker feedback cycles.
  • Customizability
    CircleCI provides powerful configuration options through YAML files, allowing users to tailor their CI/CD pipelines to specific project requirements.
  • Free Tier Availability
    CircleCI offers a free plan that includes several features, making it suitable for small projects and open-source contributions.

Possible disadvantages of CircleCI

  • Learning Curve for Advanced Features
    While CircleCI is generally user-friendly, mastering advanced configurations and optimizations can take time and require a deeper understanding of the platform.
  • Cost for Higher Tiers
    The pricing for higher-tier plans can become expensive, especially for large teams or enterprises requiring extensive usage and advanced features.
  • Limited Concurrency in Free Plan
    The free plan has limited concurrent builds, which might not be sufficient for larger projects with high parallelization needs.
  • Occasional Stability Issues
    Users have reported occasional performance and stability issues, particularly during high-demand periods, which can slow down the build process.
  • Configuration Complexity
    If not properly managed, the YAML configuration files can become complex and difficult to maintain for larger projects, leading to potential misconfigurations.

Composer features and specs

  • Dependency Management
    Composer allows for easy and efficient management of PHP dependencies, ensuring that the correct versions are used and conflicts are minimized.
  • Autoloading
    Composer supports autoloading, which means you don't have to manually include or require files, reducing boilerplate code.
  • Version Control
    It allows developers to specify and install the exact versions of the libraries they need, which helps in maintaining consistency across different environments.
  • Community Support
    Composer has a vast and active community, resulting in a plethora of libraries and packages readily available for use.
  • PSR Compliance
    Composer adheres to PHP-FIG PSR standards, promoting best practices and interoperability among PHP projects.
  • Custom Repositories
    Ability to use custom repositories allows for flexibility, enabling enterprises to create their own repository for internal use.

Possible disadvantages of Composer

  • Learning Curve
    Beginners may find Composer overwhelming due to its command-line interface and the complexity of managing dependencies.
  • Performance
    Installing or updating packages can sometimes be slow, particularly for projects with many dependencies.
  • Dependency Conflicts
    While Composer aims to minimize conflicts, complex projects can still face issues with dependency resolution that require manual intervention.
  • File Size
    Projects using Composer can lead to increased file sizes due to the inclusion of multiple libraries and their dependencies.
  • Security
    Including third-party packages can expose a project to potential security vulnerabilities if those packages are not well-maintained or audited.

CircleCI videos

CircleCI Part 1: Introduction to Unit Testing and Continuous Integration

More videos:

  • Tutorial - How To Setup CircleCI On Your Next Project (Vue, React, or Angular)

Composer videos

AI vs Human Music Composer 2019 - Orb Composer Review

More videos:

  • Review - Review Composer Cloud from EastWest / Soundsonline.com
  • Review - Behringer Composer PRO-XL MDX2600 Review (AUDIO TEST)

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to CircleCI and Composer)
Continuous Integration
100 100%
0% 0
Development Tools
0 0%
100% 100
DevOps Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Javascript UI Libraries
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare CircleCI and Composer

CircleCI Reviews

The Best Alternatives to Jenkins for Developers
CircleCI is a cloud-based CI/CD platform that has gained significant traction in recent years. With a focus on simplicity and ease of use, CircleCI offers a streamlined approach to automating your build, test, and deployment processes. One of its standout features is its strong support for Docker, making it a great choice for teams working with containerized applications.
Source: morninglif.com
Top 5 Jenkins Alternatives in 2024: Automation of IT Infrastructure Written by Uzair Ghalib on the 02nd Jan 2024
CircleCI– Get unparalleled performance and insights with CircleCI’s interactive dashboard and automatic upgrades – revolutionizing the way you build and deploy your applications.
Source: attuneops.io
Top 10 Most Popular Jenkins Alternatives for DevOps in 2024
CircleCI can be a Jenkins replacement for teams seeking a managed experience where performance and support options are priorities. CircleCI is also investing heavily in building new capabilities that cater to the pipeline requirements of apps using AI and ML.
Source: spacelift.io
35+ Of The Best CI/CD Tools: Organized By Category
CircleCI is a complete CI/CD pipeline tool. You can monitor the statuses of your various pipelines from your dashboard. Additionally, CircleCI helps you manage your build logs, access controls, and testing. It’s one of the most popular DevOps and CI/CD platforms in the world.
10 Jenkins Alternatives in 2021 for Developers
CircleCI is generally recognized for its flexibility and compatibility. Customization is obviously an important factor when making the switch from Jenkins and CircleCI certainly takes an impressive swing at providing users with a solid collection of features.

Composer Reviews

We have no reviews of Composer yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Composer should be more popular than CircleCI. It has been mentiond 143 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.

CircleCI mentions (77)

  • Improving API Performance In Legacy Systems: A Guide for API Developers
    Tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, and CircleCI offer capabilities for parallel testing and test caching, allowing multiple tests to run simultaneously. This approach significantly reduces overall testing time and prevents unnecessary delays in deployment. Industry leaders such as Netflix and Amazon employ these practices to minimize outages and maintain high service quality. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • Top 17 DevOps AI Tools [2025]
    CircleCI is a leading cloud-based platform for CI/CD that automates the software development process, enabling teams to build, test, and deploy applications with efficiency and precision. By integrating seamlessly with popular version control systems like GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket, CircleCI enhances collaboration and accelerates development cycles. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • Building a serverless GenAI API with FastAPI, AWS, and CircleCI
    GitHub and CircleCI Accounts: You will need a GitHub account to host your project’s repository and a CircleCI account to automate testing and deployment through CI/CD. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • CircleCI vs. Jenkins
    CircleCI is a CI/CD platform that automates the process of building, testing, and deploying software. It helps developers integrate code changes more frequently and efficiently, ensuring that software development teams can detect and fix errors quickly. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • AIOps, DevOps, MLOps, LLMOps – What’s the Difference?
    CI/CD tools: Tools like Jenkins, CircleCI, and GitLab CI to automate the build and deployment pipeline. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
View more

Composer mentions (143)

  • Arguments a customer can understand not to use WordPress
    There is also no requirement to follow the PHP-FIG standards. The best thing that is build because of those standards is Composer. The most plugins I downloaded while writing use composer. The problem is that the plugins ship with their own vendor directory. While the standard is to have one vendor directory for the whole project. This results in different packages with the same or different version of it in the... - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Insights from the PHP Foundation Executive Director
    “Extensions are now very close to being like packages; they basically look like Composer packages. It’s still open to discussion whether PIE will be part of Composer someday. It’s not decided yet, but I hope it will be,” Roman added. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • PHP Core Security Audit Results
    Dependencies are managed by Composer (like npm, cargo, etc) for more than 10 years now. https://getcomposer.org. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago
  • WordPress and Components
    Composer and Packagist have become key tools for establishing the foundations of PHP-based applications. Packagist is essentially a directory containing PHP code out of which Composer, a PHP-dependency manager, retrieves packages. Their ease of use and exceptional features simplify the process of importing and managing own and third-party components into our PHP projects. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • 2025 Best PHP Micro Frameworks: Slim, Flight, Fat-Free, Lumen, and More!
    Simplicity: Getting started is a breeze—install via Composer, define some routes, and you’re off. Scaling up? Add middleware or libs like Twig or Eloquent as needed. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing CircleCI and Composer, 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

jQuery - The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library.

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

React Native - A framework for building native apps with React

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.

Babel - Babel is a compiler for writing next generation JavaScript.