Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Earthly VS Travis CI

Compare Earthly VS Travis CI and see what are their differences

Earthly logo Earthly

Build anything via containers

Travis CI logo 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.
  • Earthly Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-29
  • Travis CI Travis CI for Simple, Flexible, Trustworthy CI/CD Tools
    Travis CI for Simple, Flexible, Trustworthy CI/CD Tools //
    2024-10-22

Founded in Berlin, Germany, in 2011, Travis CI grew quickly and became a trusted name in CI/CD, gaining popularity among software developers and engineers starting their careers. In 2019, Travis CI became part of Idera, Inc., the parent company of global B2B software productivity brands whose solutions enable technical users to work faster and do more with less.

Today, developers at 300,000 organizations use Travis CI. We often hear about the pangs of nostalgia these folks feel when they use Travis CI, as it was one of the first tools they used at the beginning of their career journey. We are still much here, supporting those who have stuck with us along the way and remaining the best next destination on your CI/CD journey, whether you’re building your first pipelines or trying to bring some thrill back into work that’s become overloaded with AI and DevSecOps complexity.

Our Mission:

We deliver the simplest and most flexible CI/CD tool to developers eager for ownership of their code quality, transparency in how they problem-solve with peers, and pride in the results they create—one LOC at a time.

Our Promise:

We aim for nothing less than to guide every developer to the next phase of their CI/CD adventure—even if that means growing beyond our platform.

Travis CI

$ Details
paid Free Trial $13.75 / Monthly (Per Month, Per User)
Release Date
2011 January

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.

Travis CI features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    Travis CI offers a very user-friendly interface and straightforward setup process, making it accessible even for those new to CI/CD.
  • Integration with GitHub
    Seamlessly integrates with GitHub, allowing for automatic builds and tests triggered on pull requests and commits.
  • Wide Range of Language Support
    Supports numerous programming languages out of the box, providing built-in configurations for many common languages such as Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and Java.
  • Extensive Documentation
    Offers comprehensive and well-organized documentation, which can help users troubleshoot and understand complex setups.
  • Build Matrix
    Run your unit and integration tests across any combination of environments for comprehensive automation and absolute quality guarantees on your way to production.

Possible disadvantages of Travis CI

  • Pricing for Private Repositories
    Can become expensive for private repositories and larger teams, especially compared to some competitors that offer more generous free tiers.
  • Performance Issues
    Users have reported occasional performance issues, including slower build times and longer wait periods for queued jobs.
  • Limited Advanced Features
    Might lack some advanced features and customizations that are available in other CI/CD platforms, making it less suitable for very complex workflows.
  • Concurrency Limits
    Has limitations on the number of concurrent builds that can run, which can slow down development cycles for larger projects with many contributors.
  • Complex Configuration for Large Projects
    Configuration can become cumbersome and complex for large projects with intricate dependencies and multiple build steps.

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

Analysis of Travis CI

Overall verdict

  • Travis CI is a widely used continuous integration service that is generally considered good for many development projects.

Why this product is good

  • Travis CI integrates seamlessly with GitHub, which allows for automated testing and deployment processes. It is simple to set up for open-source projects and supports multiple programming languages and operating systems. The platform's intuitive interface and extensive documentation make it accessible to both beginners and experienced developers.

Recommended for

  • Open-source projects
  • Teams looking for easy GitHub integration
  • Projects that require regular automated testing
  • Developers who value extensive community support
  • Projects with varying tech stacks, due to its multi-language support

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

Travis CI videos

Setting Up Your First Build

More videos:

  • Tutorial - CI/CD Core Concepts
  • Tutorial - How to Get Started with Travis CI in 0 to 5 Minutes

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Earthly and Travis CI)
Continuous Integration
14 14%
86% 86
DevOps Tools
12 12%
88% 88
Continuous Deployment
11 11%
89% 89
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 Travis CI

Earthly Reviews

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Travis CI Reviews

The Best Alternatives to Jenkins for Developers
Travis CI is another popular cloud-based CI/CD solution that integrates well with GitHub. Known for its simplicity and ease of setup, Travis CI is a great choice for open-source projects or teams that primarily work with GitHub repositories. Its configuration is based on a YAML file, making it easy to define and manage build workflows.
Source: morninglif.com
Top 10 Most Popular Jenkins Alternatives for DevOps in 2024
Travis CI is known for its simple setup, quick parallel builds, and support for multiple architectures, including popular enterprise options like IBM PowerPC and IBM Z. It’s claimed that pipelines require approximately 33% less configurable code than other CI/CD solutions, which helps make the platform more approachable. Use it instead of Jenkins when you want a fast...
Source: spacelift.io
10 Jenkins Alternatives in 2021 for Developers
You might find that Travis CI proudly promotes the fact that they have more than 900,000 open-source projects and 600,000 users on their platform with Travis CI. Automated deployment can be quickly established by following the tutorials and documentation that are currently available on their website.
The Best Alternatives to Jenkins for Developers
Travis CI is a continuous integration and testing CI/CD tool. It is free of cost for open source projects and provides seamless integration with GitHub. It supports more than 20 languages, like Node.js, PHP, Python, etc. along with Docker.
Continuous Integration. CircleCI vs Travis CI vs Jenkins
Travis CI is recommended for cases when you are working on the open-source projects, that should be tested in different environments.
Source: djangostars.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Earthly should be more popular than Travis CI. It has been mentiond 51 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 / 24 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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Travis CI mentions (6)

  • Front-end Guide
    We used Travis CI for our continuous integration (CI) pipeline. Travis is a highly popular CI on Github and its build matrix feature is useful for repositories which contain multiple projects like Grab's. We configured Travis to do the following:. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Flutter
    CI/CD for autobuild + autotests (Codemagic or Travis CI). Source: over 2 years ago
  • How To Build Your First CI/CD Pipeline With Travis CI?
    Step 2: Log on to Travis CI and sign up with your GitHub account used above. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
  • What does a DevOps engineer actually do?
    Some other hosted CI products, such as CircleCI and Travis Cl, are completely hosted in the cloud. It is becoming more popular for small organizations to use hosted CI products, as they allow engineering teams to begin continuous integration as soon as possible. Source: almost 4 years ago
  • Hosting an Angular application on GitHub Pages using Travis CI
    1. Let's create the account. Access the site https://travis-ci.com/ and click on the button Sign up. - Source: dev.to / almost 4 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Earthly and Travis CI, 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

Buildbot - Python-based continuous integration testing framework

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.

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

TeamCity - TeamCity is an ultimate Continuous Integration tool for professionals