Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Earthly VS CircleCI

Compare Earthly VS CircleCI and see what are their differences

Earthly logo Earthly

Build anything via containers

CircleCI logo CircleCI

CircleCI gives web developers powerful Continuous Integration and Deployment with easy setup and maintenance.
  • Earthly Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-29
  • CircleCI Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-05

CircleCI

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

Earthly features and specs

  • Reproducible builds
    Earthly allows developers to create reproducible builds, ensuring that the build process is consistent across different environments.
  • Simplified CI/CD
    Earthly can integrate with existing CI/CD pipelines, providing a unified platform to define build and deployment processes, thereby reducing complexity and overhead.
  • Ease of Use
    Earthly uses a simple and intuitive syntax, which makes it easy for developers to get started quickly without a steep learning curve.
  • Cross-platform builds
    Earthly supports cross-platform builds, allowing developers to build applications for multiple environments from a single Earthfile.
  • Cache Optimization
    Earthly leverages caching mechanisms to optimize build times, saving both time and computing resources during the build process.

Possible disadvantages of Earthly

  • Learning Curve
    Although simpler than some alternatives, there is still a learning curve associated with understanding and utilizing Earthly effectively.
  • Community & Ecosystem
    Being relatively new, Earthly's community and ecosystem are not as expansive as more established tools, which can limit available resources and support.
  • Limited Integrations
    Earthly may have fewer direct integrations with other tools and services compared to well-established CI/CD ecosystems like Jenkins or GitHub Actions.
  • Runtime Performance
    For highly complex builds, the runtime performance might not match that of highly optimized, purpose-built CI/CD systems.
  • Vendor Lock-in
    Relying heavily on Earthly for CI/CD processes might lead to a certain degree of vendor lock-in, making it challenging to switch to other tools if needed in the future.

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.

Analysis of Earthly

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Earthly is considered good, especially for teams looking to streamline their build processes and enhance productivity. Its features and ease of use make it a valuable tool in modern software development workflows.

Why this product is good

  • Earthly (earthly.dev) is praised for its user-friendly approach to automating builds and CI/CD pipelines. It is particularly appreciated for its ability to run builds locally in the same environment as in continuous integration, thus ensuring consistency. Earthly also allows the reusability of build steps and has a minimal learning curve, especially for those familiar with Docker.

Recommended for

  • Development teams looking to simplify their build processes
  • Organizations seeking consistent build environments across local and CI systems
  • Developers familiar with Docker who want an easy transition
  • Projects with complex build dependencies that require reusable steps

Earthly videos

Earthly souls and spirits moon oracle - De Terri Foss - Review ♥️♥️

More videos:

  • Review - Special Valentine's Day Review - Earthly Body EDIBLE Massage Products! Vegan and CF!
  • Review - Earthly Touches Review

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)

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Earthly and CircleCI)
Continuous Integration
DevOps Tools
8 8%
92% 92
Continuous Deployment
7 7%
93% 93
API Tools
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

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

Earthly Reviews

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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.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, CircleCI should be more popular than Earthly. It has been mentiond 78 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.

Earthly mentions (51)

  • DevOps in 2025: the future is automated, git-ified, and kinda scary but fun.
    Earthly — CI/CD that runs like code, repeatably and fast. - Source: dev.to / 23 days ago
  • We're Leaving Kubernetes
    Have folks seen success with https://earthly.dev/ as a tool in their dev cycle? - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago
  • I Like Makefiles
    Many have mentioned just, but I'm a much bigger fan of Earthly [0]. It allows you to write something similar to a Makefile, but everything runs in Docker. This gets you isolated builds with parallelism and caching built-in. I've found it to be great especially for small to medium projects. For some examples, I use it to publish my personal site/blog [1] and to build a C/C++/Fortran/Rust cross-compiler targeting... - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
  • Faster Docker builds using a remote BuildKit instance
    This is basically what we do, except we use Earthly[1]. An Earthly satellite is basically a modified remote Docker Buildkit instance. [1]: https://earthly.dev/. - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • I stopped worrying and loved Makefiles
    Make is excellent if you use it properly to model your dependencies. This works really well for languages like C/C++, but I think Make really struggles with languages like Go, JavaScript, and Python or when your using a large combination of technologies. I've found Earthly [0] to be the _perfect_ tool to replace Make. It's a familiar syntax (combination of Dockerfiles + Makefiles). Every target is run in an... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
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CircleCI mentions (78)

  • End-to-end testing and deployment of a multi-agent AI system with Docker, LangGraph, and CircleCI
    In this tutorial, you will walk through the process of building, testing, and deploying a multi-agent AI system using LangGraph, Docker, AWS Lambda, and CircleCI. You will develop a research-driven AI workflow where different agents,such as fact-checking, summarization, and search agents, work together seamlessly. You will package this application into a Docker container, deploy it to AWS Lambda, and automate the... - Source: dev.to / 1 day ago
  • 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 / 3 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 / 3 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
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Earthly and CircleCI, 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.

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

Buildbot - Python-based continuous integration testing framework

Buildkite - Buildkite is a platform for running fast, secure, and scalable continuous integration pipelines on your own infrastructure.

Buddy - The simplest CI/CD tool ever made, acclaimed by top developers worldwide. It uses delivery pipelines to build, test and deploy software. Pipelines are created with over 100 ready-to-use actions, that can be arranged in any way.