Codeship vs Buddy: Which is a better fit?

Doug N.: Hi, my name is Doug. I'm a lead developer. I give Buddy a five out of five. For more reviews, click the link below. I have used various continuous integration or continuous development platforms. This includes Jenkins, Beanstalk, as well as Codefresh. The reason why I haven't necessarily liked those specifically is because the user interface wasn't something that I necessarily understood or the learning curve was extraordinarily steep, not to mention the customer service at times was somewhat spotty. For whatever reason, they just didn't necessarily make sense to me. I know Jenkins has an extraordinarily large following across some of the DevOps community, but that's the reason why I was looking for other solutions and that's where Buddy really filled that void in my development career. I chose Buddy simply just because ... I actually think I saw a marketing campaign, whether it be via social or maybe it was Product Hunt way back when. I've been using Buddy for, gosh, four years now and obviously they've gone through a significant evolution. They've added tons of features as well as various individual user interface improvements, and so I've seen that really great progression of what they are now. One of the big things, the reason why I really fell in love with them is because, as I was talking about it a little bit earlier, is the fact that they really kind of lowered the learning curve for somebody who is not necessarily very familiar with continuous integration or continuous deployment. I really felt like that it was something that it was accessible to myself and, not to mention, they really give you the necessary tools to really customize your deployment experience as well as being able to give you those one click installs for various platforms, whether that be Google Firebase or just a simple FTP upload, any kind of Node.js compilation steps, as well as being able to basically customize those individual environments with a setting of configurations or environment variables that really suits your deployment process. The onboarding process for me, and again, as I said, it's been a little bit now since I actually like started working with them, but they did send me a series of emails. Actually, speaking of emails, that's one of the things that I really do like about them is the fact that I get almost weekly change, basically like change a lot or feature release notes that they send out or bug fixes that they have sent out to their platform. Not to mention that they've got a, almost like a continuous education section of their website where they're constantly publishing articles and/or content that's relative to their platform, if you will and it basically challenges you to learn new things, as well as basically reemphasize or basically grow your own skill sets. And so with that said, all of those articles actually, it's informing you, but also at the same time though, it's also stepping you through their platform and some of the features that they provide, as well as basically just helping you think about how you can improve your own development process. One of the things that I would say, for somebody who's really thinking about engaging with Buddy is the fact that their deployment process is based on a Docker image. And so if you're familiar with Docker, Docker gives you the ability to install the necessary dependencies within a specific pipeline that you can actually customize to fit your needs. There are other individual continuous integration platforms that don't necessarily give you that level of flexibility. Plus it also gives you the ability to import your own Docker images as well. So you have that additional layer of personalization that you can actually then bring into your own pipelines. Buddy admittedly is a little bit more expensive than some of the other platforms on the market; however, I would say their customer support is absolutely [inaudible 00:01:08], and they also give you the ability to really work with the team, as well as being able to have some of those other comments and other levels of communication, especially for remote teams nowadays that some of these other platforms like Codefresh or Jenkins may not necessarily give you.