Top CI/CD Tools Comparison: Choose the Right Pipeline Solution
In this article, youʼll learn a bit about what CI is, what CD is (both Delivery and Deployment), and the top five CICD tools for 2025.
What Is CI
Continuous Integration CI consists of the following practices:
- Test the code
- Secure the code
- Confirm that the code can compile into an artifact/binary
For example, letʼs take the process of creating a container image.
First, you would run unit/mock/integration/any other tests against the code base to ensure that itʼs working as expected. Next, youʼd ensure that proper security measures are taken. That could be anything from running a security linter to a SAST-based tool to ensure security and compliance of the code. Next, youʼd have a Dockerfile (or another mechanism if youʼre using something like cloud-native buildpacks) and run the appropriate measures to confirm that the container image can in fact be created based on the information thatʼs available. After all of that, you would create a container image.
Thatʼs the entire process of what occurs automatically for you within the CI pipeline.
Once the CI pipeline passes, itʼs then ready for CD.
What Is CD
There are two forms of CD:
- Continuous Deployment
- Continuous Delivery
Continuous Deployment automatically deploys the artifact after it has passed the test and build stages of CI. Once the CI pipeline passes, the artifact/application stack is automatically deployed to the environment youʼre targeting (dev, staging, production, etc.) with zero human intervention.
Continuous Delivery is prepared to deploy based on the successful CI pipeline passing all of its tests and builds, but it does not automatically deploy to the environment. Instead, youʼll typically have a “buttonˮ that youʼll click to do the deployment. Oftentimes, especially in production, youʼll see Continuous Delivery used more than Continuous Deployment.
Top Five Tools
Because CICD has been around for a while, there have been several tools that have been created and used. There are way more than five CICD tools. In fact, many cloud providers even create addons for services that have a build/deployment step that you can enable, so with that in mind, you can image that there are a lot of options.
With all of that in mind, letʼs talk about the, what appear to be the most popular solutions this year.
💡 Once concept to understand for all CICD tools is “runnersˮ. Runners are where the pipelines actually run. The runners can be in the cloud, within the CICD tool, or even on-prem. For example, I can use Gitlab to build a pipeline and the actual pipeline itself could be running on a VM in my datacenter.
Gitlab
Gitlab is almost like an ecosystem within itself. It has CICD and thatʼs really where it started, but it also has several other DevOps-based tools like built-in Kubernetes integration, auto-scaling runners, and both self-managed and SaaS-based options to run Gitlab. Gitlab really focuses on the full Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) for on-prem and cloud-based workloads.
Circle CI
Circle CI is really focused on making everything as simplistic as possible. It may not have all of the bells and whistles that other CICD providers have, but it has exactly what you need to get the job done. As with the majority of CICD providers, the pipelines are written in YAML, which seems to be the standard across almost all CICD providers.
Azure DevOps
Azure DevOps is a CICD platform that was created by Microsoft. Although youʼll see a lot of organizations that use it are Microsoft-focused, you can use it for any cloud and on-prem environment. Azure DevOps is a suite of tools, so aside from CICD, it also comes with a Git-based source control system, a place to store artifacts, and a board to create tickets and issues (like Jira). It has a UI-based CICD system and a YAML-based CICD system, but over the years the YAML- based system has been the most utilized method.
GitHub Actions
GitHub Actions is a CICD system that runs inside of/on GitHub, which is the worlds most popular source control system. It consists of a YAML-based pipeline structure and it builds on the code that exists within GitHub. You can use it for both cloud and on-prem environments. If youʼre in GitHub already, itʼs a great place to start the CICD journey.
💡 I canʼt entirely say if this is still true or not, but there was a lot of talk a few years ago that GitHub Actions was going to essentially “take overˮ Azure DevOps. However, Azure DevOps continues to be in the product line and itʼs still built upon, so perhaps thatʼs no longer happening.
Jenkins
Jenkins is most likely the oldest CICD system and although itʼs still very popular, there arenʼt a lot of organizations that are starting net new on Jenkins. The majority of organizations that are using Jenkins is because they started on it and it would be pricey to move off of it. itʼs fully open-source and works across on-prem and cloud-based environments. Itʼs clear that Jenkins is becoming outdated and teams may want to start looking at alternatives.
Closing Thoughts
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment/Delivery are here to stay, or at least a form of the build/deploy process. There will always be a need to build/compile code, test it, secure it, and deploy it. It may be called something other than CICD, but the concept of what CICD is will stay. With that being said, itʼs a great skill to have and a great thought process to implement for any dev, staging, and production environment.
