Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

GNU Make VS Travis CI

Compare GNU Make VS Travis CI and see what are their differences

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GNU Make logo GNU Make

GNU Make is a tool which controls the generation of executables and other non-source files of a program from the program's source files.

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.
  • GNU Make Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-12
  • 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

GNU Make features and specs

  • Portability
    GNU Make is highly portable and can be used across various Unix-like operating systems as well as on Windows.
  • Dependency Management
    It efficiently handles complex dependencies between various parts of the software, ensuring that changes are propagated properly.
  • Open Source
    Being open-source software, GNU Make is freely available and can be modified according to user needs.
  • Wide Adoption
    It is widely adopted in the industry, which means that there is extensive documentation and a large community for support.
  • Efficiency
    GNU Make speeds up the build process by only recompiling the necessary parts of the codebase.

Possible disadvantages of GNU Make

  • Complex Syntax
    The syntax of GNU Makefiles can become very complex, especially for large projects, making them hard to read and maintain.
  • Limited Cross-Platform Scripting
    While the tool itself is cross-platform, Makefiles can sometimes include shell commands that are not portable.
  • Steep Learning Curve
    Beginners may find it challenging to grasp the concepts and syntax of GNU Make, leading to a steep learning curve.
  • Debugging Difficulty
    Debugging Makefiles can be difficult, with limited tools available to trace or step through the make process.
  • Performance Bottlenecks
    For extremely large projects, performance can become an issue, as the evaluation of dependencies might become slow.

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.

GNU Make videos

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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 GNU Make and Travis CI)
Front End Package Manager
Continuous Integration
0 0%
100% 100
JS Build Tools
100 100%
0% 0
DevOps Tools
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 GNU Make and Travis CI

GNU Make 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, Travis CI seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 6 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.

GNU Make mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of GNU Make yet. Tracking of GNU Make recommendations started around Mar 2021.

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 / over 2 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
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing GNU Make and Travis CI, you can also consider the following products

CMake - CMake is an open-source, cross-platform family of tools designed to build, test and package software.

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

SCons - SCons is an Open Source software construction tool—that is, a next-generation build tool.

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

SBT - SBT is a build tool for Scala, like Ant or Maven but with hieroglyphics.

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