Continuous Integration Tools for 2021

Continuous integration is a development technique that needs developers to integrate codes into a repository, numerous times a day. Every check-in is then confirmed by an automated build, letting teams notice problems at an early stage. The aim of continuous integration is to offer quick feedback so that if a flaw is introduced into the code base, it can be recognized and corrected as quickly as possible. Continuous integration of software and tools can be used to automate the testing process and build a document trail. Continuous integration Tools automate many tedious tasks and keep records of the growth of projects.

Top 10 Continuous Integration Tools

1. CircleCI
2. Jenkins
3. Pantheon
4. Buddy
5. Bamboo
6. TeamCity Continuous Integration
7. AWS CodePipeline Continuous Integration
8. Semaphore
9. Chef
10. CruiseControl

Market Overview

The continuous integration tools market is highly competitive with the presence of many market players, including top-tier and mid-tier companies. Moreover, the continuous integration solution has many added advantages over the traditional integration method opted by developers. Also, small firms and start-ups are entering the market to leverage emerging opportunities, such as analytics, immutable infrastructure, containerization, and machine learning, in the ecosystem. Enterprises are adopting the continuous integration tools along with continuous delivery practices to make sure that each change is verified by an automated build, allowing teams to detect problems at the early stage. By integrating regularly, developers can detect errors quickly and locate them more easily to take necessary actions in rectifying the error.

Continuous integration is a widely accepted development practice in the software development industry, where the team members integrate and merge codes multiple times a day. Continuous integration enables software companies to have a shorter and frequent release cycle to improve software quality and increase their team’s productivity through automated software building and testing practice. The adoption of new methodologies, such as containerization, microservices, and pipeline automation, has increased the adoption of both continuous integration tools and continuous delivery. This new Agile development methodology focuses on the need to shorten the release and feedback cycles, allowing the business-critical application to reach users error-free and within the stipulated time. Such benefits are expected to boost the growth of the continuous integration tools market.

The MicroQuadrant matrix provides detailed information about the Continuous Integration Tools companies. It sum-ups the inferences and analysis of how well each market player performs within the predefined MicroQuadrant standards. The vendor evaluations are based on 2 broad categories,i.e. Product Maturity and Company Maturity. The individual category has different criteria, based on which the vendors have been evaluated. The evaluation criteria considered under the Product Maturity comprise product offerings & solutions, core features, product quality and reliability, type of deployment, and support services. The evaluation criteria considered under the Company Maturity comprise the geographic footprint, industries catered, partner ecosystem, and inorganic strategies like joint ventures, partnerships & collaborations, and mergers & acquisitions.

Visionary Leaders have a strong portfolio of products and solutions offered to their clients. These companies seem to be investing significantly in R&D to introduce innovations in Continuous Integration tools. Furthermore, these companies have also undertaken various organic and inorganic strategies to achieve continuous and progressive growth in the Continuous Integration Tools market.

Dynamic Differentiators have a wide network of channel partners and resellers to optimize the deployment of their solutions across a multitude of industry verticals. These vendors have been constantly generating positive revenue growth in the Continuous Integration tools market and their market position has emerged by their organic and inorganic strategies adopted.

Innovators in the Continuous Integration tools provide innovative solutions and they also have an extensive range of product offerings. The innovators have been leading in deploying their solutions for niche and custom software requirements of the clients.

The emerging players offer focused and customized continuous integration tools to their clients. These vendors plan new ways of working to drive business results in the market.

What are the major drivers in the Continuous Integration Tools market?

1. Automation of the software development processes to quickly release software applications

In the software development process, integration of the code is a crucial step, and when multiple developers are working individually to develop software, they need to integrate the code in a repository. The integration by multiple developers may create bugs and quality problems in the software. Hence, the demand for continuous integration tools that can automate the build and test process is growing. Also, the continuous integration tools help a developer find the bugs in the early development cycle, and thereby help reduce the time and cost associated with finding the same in the later development cycles. The process thereby helps developers reduce the overall development cycle. Here, continuous integration software is becoming crucial in the application development process, as they can considerably reduce the time required to create a build, and improve developer productivity, and thereby accelerate the time-to-market.

2. Software becoming a critical component of various business functions

Nowadays, the software has become an integral part of businesses, and its usage is growing to streamline the business processes across industry verticals. Also, with the growing adoption of digital technologies, organizations are focusing on exploring numerous opportunities to achieve higher business growth. However, the adoption of digital strategies to deliver a seamless experience can be circumscribed by legacy enterprise applications that are slower to adopt and have longer development cycles. As a result, organizations need to focus on the speed at which they can deliver high-quality software or upgrade the version of the old one. The best Continuous integration tools can help organizations speed up the manual integration process, which would further help deliver software updates more frequently at a rapid pace. As a result, decision-makers across industries are focusing on the adoption of continuous integration software to minimize development cycles and deliver enhanced customer experience.

3. Growing demand for cloud-deployed continuous integrations tools

The adoption of cloud-deployed continuous integration is growing to leverage the benefits offered by the cloud deployment model. The cloud-based providers are offering platforms to help developers focus on the development process, thereby reducing the efforts required to build new servers and processes, such as purchasing, installation, configuration, and updating of software. Therefore, to achieve a hassle-free experience, the demand for cloud-based continuous integration tools is growing. As a result, many providers of the best continuous integration tools have started providing Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions. The Continuous Integrations Tools offered via the cloud help developers with software development and delivery processes, such as software building, testing, and release management. Also, the companies are focusing on a cloud-based deployment model to leverage the benefits offered by the on-demand model. For instance, Microsoft helped Royal Dutch Shell move its on-premises Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server setup to the cloud. This move helped Royal Dutch Shell reduce the hassles associated with the software and server upgradation. Also, there are various service providers, such as Atlassian (Bamboo), Travis CI, CloudBees, and Circle CI, focusing on delivering cloud-based continuous integration.

4. Increasing use of continuous integration tools across verticals

Continuous integration devices are becoming crucial to gain a competitive advantage and reduce the time and costs associated with the development process. Customer satisfaction is becoming the ultimate priority to achieve higher revenue and sales. Therefore, the decision-makers across industries are focusing on the integration of continuous integration tools into their operations to leverage the benefits offered by the best continuous integration tools. Therefore, to enhance the quality of software delivered, and reduce build time, various industries, such as BFSI, oil and gas, retail and consumer goods, eCommerce, and aerospace, have started deploying the continuous integration tools into their operations.

What are the major challenges faced in the Continuous Integration Tools market?  

1. Existing Integration Methods

Business organizations have been using the traditional methods for a longer period to integrate the code at the source. Moreover, it is hard to convince developers to accept continuous integration, owing to their usual style of working by other methods. Businesses with established processes, tools, and skills to manage tasks will resist modifications that challenge the current practices. The significant commitment toward changing the existing practices by including continuous integration tools and continuous delivery practice to become a true DevOps organization.

Other factors, such as setup for continuous integration, come with some disadvantages. The job configuration is not stored in the version control system, which creates difficulty while setting up a new job correctly or to track configuration changes. Other issues for organizations are the various tools, such as JDK, Maven, node, and gulp, which need to be installed and maintained. This increases the maintenance effort and cost and can slow down the development. Hence, it may affect the adoption of the best continuous integration tools by organizations.

2. Lack of expertise in assembling and setting up continuous integration tools

End-users, such as enterprises, believe that the implementation of a continuous integration tools on current projects may cause multiple changes in processes related to the integration. The most operative method of continuous integration implementation is an incremental approach. It infers that builds and tests occur only one time per day and eventually increases the frequency as developers gain familiarity with it. Apart from all the added benefits, the assemble time for setting up continuous integration poses a significant challenge for its adoption in the market. Moreover, the additional expenses of buying hardware for continuous integration and software (if not open-source) is another challenge for promoting the adoption of the best continuous integration tools. Non-experts may face some difficulties to use and assemble continuous integration devices. Hence, many organizations shy away from using continuous integration software in their development environment.

3. Availability of Open Source Tools

Continuous integration tools are central to continuous delivery (CD) practice. Hence, the availability of open-source tools and projects dominating commercial solutions are affecting the adoption of continuous integration. Lack of business vision and change management can lead to unorganized efforts among teams trying to speed up individual processes. In such situations, teams try to adopt tools that are multifunctional and minimal cost incurring. With a plethora of open source tools positioning as continuous delivery ready or continuous delivery capabilities, it is easy to choose the wrong tools that may hinder collaborations between teams. Jenkins is an open-source continuous integration tools that holds 70% of the market share in the continuous integration tools market. Another issue with open source tools is that in many cases they only support small teams with minimum development needs. Any enterprise-level practice requires the paid version of the same tool. In such situations, a growing team is stuck with a tool that might not support their requirements anymore but to change itself requires considerable time and resource investment in terms of training and toolsets supported. Commercial platforms try to position themselves as supporting third-party integrations to allow organizations to make an easy transition from open source, limited functionality, manually interfaced tools to an automated and orchestrated toolchain. Organizations at the lower end of maturity level in terms of continuous delivery and continuous integration practices still opt for free tools with a lack of automation and orchestration capabilities, cutting into the shares of commercial continuous integration devices and platforms.

What is the deployment model used for Continuous Integration Devices?

The best continuous integration tools market has been segmented by the deployment model into the cloud and on-premises. Continuous integration tools can be deployed both on-premises as well as in the cloud, as per the business requirements of users. The on-premises deployment model is usually adopted by organizations that want complete and full control over the solution. Moreover, organizations that deal with sensitive data prefer the on-premises deployment model over the cloud mode. With on-premises solutions, organizations do not need to worry about issues related to the maintenance of the solutions, vendor outages, and many more. The cloud deployment model offers organizations benefits such as ease of access and faster deployment of continuous integration tools. As more and more applications are being deployed over the cloud, there is a shift from traditional on-premises to cloud-based best continuous integration tools, both among large enterprises and SMEs.

On-Premises

On-premises deployment refers to the deployment of the software and technology within a company’s local network infrastructure. The on-premises deployment model is the traditional approach to implementing continuous integration tools across a company’s IT infrastructure. The benefit of deploying on-premises software/server is that companies have complete control over the software, and it can be managed and controlled by the internal IT team. Moreover, organizations that deal with sensitive information prefer the on-premises deployment mode compared to the cloud deployment mode, due to the rising data breaches and security issues.

Continuous integration tools deployed on-premises can help organizations carry out several tasks, such as downloads, installations, and configuration as per business requirements. Moreover, on-premises software deployment generally requires a software license for each user.

Cloud

Cloud deployment is the on-demand deployment of a software/solution based on the hosted internet connection. Cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and PaaS services help organizations reduce the CAPEX and other costs associated with the installation and management of the software/solution. Organizations, nowadays, are focusing on the faster delivery of applications and releasing frequent updates to achieve a competitive advantage. With cloud-based continuous integration tools, organizations can focus more on the core tasks, rather than worrying about purchasing, installing, and managing continuous integration tools. The use of cloud-based continuous integration tools is expected to grow, as companies are rapidly adopting cloud-based continuous integration solution tools to leverage benefits such as enhanced speed, better flexibility, more security, and reduced cost. Moreover, many continuous integration providers have started providing continuous integration tools via the cloud deployment model to help organizations meet their software development and delivery needs. Some of the providers of cloud-based best continuous integration software are Atlassian (Bamboo), CloudBees (Jenkins), and CircleCI.

Based on the size, which organizations widely use Continuous Integration Devices?

The study of the best continuous integration tools in terms of organization size is significant, as it has a direct influence on the adoption of DevOps tools and services globally. Continuous integration devices enhance the capabilities of SMEs and large enterprises by transforming their software operations to optimize efficiency, quality, and reliability. Moreover, these modern development practices help software development teams release quality codes, faster and regularly. The adoption rate of continuous integration suites among large enterprises is expected to be relatively higher than among SMEs. Due to the huge IT infrastructure budget and high demand for advanced technologies, the large enterprise segment is expected to hold a larger market share during the forecast period.

Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

SMEs are the companies with below 1,000 employees. The SME segment is expected to have a faster growth rate in the best continuous integration tools market during the forecast period. SMEs normally face 3 critical challenges: lack of budget, capability, and flexibility, and management control. To handle these problems, they deploy the lift-and-shift migration strategy, which allows their business to scale and grow faster. As per the data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 30–60% of SMEs in OECD countries are investing to bring innovations into their ecosystem, despite having a lesser budget. SMEs have understood that instant responses, rapid business decisions, and customer satisfaction are the most significant facets of expanding their business, creating more revenue, and ensuring expected outcomes. The huge traction in the continuous integration market among the SMEs segment is expected to assist SMEs across the globe in scaling and growing their business faster.

Large Enterprises

Large enterprises are defined as businesses employing over 1,000 employees. The large enterprise segment is estimated to have a larger market size in 2018, and the trend is expected to continue during the forecast period. Large enterprises are keen on investing in new and latest technologies to run their business more effectively. These enterprises are also modernizing their legacy applications to reduce CAPEX and OPEX. Moreover, they have dedicated in-house IT resources along with larger IT budgets, and therefore, they can consider adopting continuous integration tools. Large enterprises have adopted continuous integration tools to ensure the smooth functioning of their business applications and reduce application complications.

Which industry verticals widely use Continuous Integration Devices?

Based on verticals, the best continuous integration tools market has been segmented into BFSI, education, media and entertainment, healthcare, retail and eCommerce, telecommunication, manufacturing, and others. The other verticals include government, logistics and transportation, and energy and utilities. The media and entertainment is projected to hold the major market share during the forecast period. In today’s application-driven market, many enterprises are undertaking digital transformation projects with the aim to provide their customers with a superior digital experience. Due to the increasing competition in the software market, enterprises are focusing on and paying more attention to the appropriate allocation of resources to develop and deliver high-quality software at an accelerated pace.

Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance

In the BFSI vertical, commercial, retail, and investment banks, and insurance and credit card providers are focusing on transforming their daily operations. Due to the increasing use of digital technologies for web and mobile banking, BFSI companies are primarily focusing on delivering an enhanced customer experience to sustain in the competitive market. This can be achieved by continuously delivering high-quality new and updated applications at a fast pace. Therefore, to meet the changing requirements of the highly competitive BFSI vertical, operations and development teams are primarily emphasizing improving their operations with the help of continuous integration tools. The best continuous integration tools can help development teams automate various processes, including application building, testing, and release. Moreover, continuous integration tools help with process automation, and they can considerably reduce the application development cycle, which further helps achieve an accelerated time-to-market. As the best continuous integration tools are becoming critical in the BFSI vertical, many banks have started deploying them into their operations. For instance, the ABN AMRO bank deployed the CloudBees Jenkins platform with continuous integration and continuous delivery practices into its operations, which increased the release frequency by 600% while reducing the build time by almost 70%. Similarly, the DBS bank deployed continuous integration /continuous delivery solutions with the aim to transform its IT operations. These examples highlight that the use of continuous integration devices is growing across the BFSI vertical and companies are adopting these tools to generate higher revenue and remain ahead of their competitors.

Retail and Ecommerce

The retail and eCommerce vertical is expected to have the second-largest market size in the continuous integration market. The increasing customer purchasing power and the need to deliver a personalized customer experience have become crucial for companies in this vertical. Moreover, the retail and eCommerce vertical is impacted by the growth and adoption of digital technologies. Many retailers have shifted from the traditional selling approach to the digital approach. Retail and eCommerce companies are also experiencing the growing pressure to reduce the operational cost and improve the selling margin. Therefore, this vertical face the need to continuously deliver efficient applications so that retailers can constantly connect and communicate with online customers, employees, and logistics vendors in real-time. Continuous integration helps retail and eCommerce companies build brand loyalty, handle the warranty and replacement of products, and increase customer retention. The tools also help retailers reduce the time required to deliver software applications, reduce risks, and ensure the timely delivery of continuous updates for customers.

Telecommunication

The telecommunication vertical is a crucial vertical in the continuous integration market. Being a highly competitive vertical, telecom operators face the continuous pressure of retaining their existing customers as well as enhancing the customer experience. Many telecom service providers are focusing on delivering IT services to promote a culture of continuous improvements. Moreover, the adoption of Agile development practices and continuous integration /continuous delivery tools is growing in the telecommunication vertical to accelerate the delivery of software applications. Software adoption has changed the way the telecommunication vertical operates. With the growing use of virtualized platforms, continuous integration /continuous delivery processes are becoming key components to smoothen the transition.

Education

With the advent of continuous integration, students are witnessing the value of test-driven workflows while learning, and teachers are saving on the time required for grading assignments. Moreover, students can hone their skills and improve their learning with the help of continuous integration. With the help of testing suites, educational institutes can change the traditional grading system with a more efficient version, but without getting bogged down with syntax issues. Continuous integration provides educators an easy process for distributing codes and collecting assignments on a single software development platform.

Media and Entertainment

The media and entertainment vertical consists of traditional media firms, digital media firms, gaming organizations, news firms, and social media platforms. This vertical is expected to hold the largest market share of the best continuous integration tools market during the forecast period.

Media and entertainment companies have started adopting continuous integration for applications and software, as the demand for automation and testing to unify the entire development process into an end-to-end process is growing. Additionally, accessible technologies have created blockades for entering all areas of the media and entertainment segment and led to a content explosion as well as competition. Every sector in the media and entertainment vertical is transforming. The print media is expected to turn into broadcast media; social media platforms have morphed into providers of news and videos, and video streaming platforms are venturing into film and television production. However, traditional media and entertainment companies are still struggling with digital transformations.

Many advanced media and entertainment organizations have adopted continuous integration to stay ahead of their competitors and address the rising customer demands. Some of these organizations are Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, and Google.

Healthcare

Healthcare is one of the most vital sectors in the world, but it is affected by many complex challenges, such as data overload, security concerns while sharing patients’ health information within institutions, and appointment scheduling difficulties. Moreover, technologies such as big data are generating a huge demand for integrated healthcare applications. To combat such situations, healthcare organizations are reaching out to software teams, who take time to deliver and deploy the solutions. The use of the best continuous integration tools in the healthcare vertical can significantly reduce the delays in the application/software release and deployment process.

Healthcare companies generate significant volumes of data from claims systems, Electronic Health Records (EHRs), pharmacies, medical devices, labs, and also from digital data sources, such as genomics and consumer apps. However, they end up facing delays in the implementation of big data projects, due to the continuous approval requests exchanged between the development teams and the operations unit. Therefore, healthcare organizations are adopting the best continuous integration tools, which can be quickly deployed and also increase the frequency of software releases, thereby preventing human errors. This vertical has also witnessed a huge demand for appointment scheduling applications and check-ups among online healthcare specialists. With these modern applications in place, patients can save time while paying visits to hospitals. Continuous integration vendors can leverage the huge growth potential in the healthcare vertical by implementing and adopting such Agile technologies into their development process.

Manufacturing

The manufacturing vertical constitutes automotive manufacturing, industrial manufacturing, electronics and communication manufacturing, chemicals and materials manufacturing, and food and agriculture manufacturing, among others. The adoption of software and digitalization trends has gained much traction in this vertical; therefore, it has become essential for manufacturing enterprises to adopt more industrialized tools and methodologies for developing software and receiving support from IT companies. As a result, IT organizations are progressively assisting manufacturing companies in the adoption of software development methodologies and continuous integration that enable frequent software releases in various versions. Additionally, these tools are robust as well as tested. The adoption of continuous integration has now become important for manufacturers who are integrating their machines with predictive maintenance algorithms, advanced control dashboards, and mobile applications to monitor the machines.

The rapidly growing IoT and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technologies are expected to spur the demand for continuous integration for better code quality. With continuous integration, manufacturers can build automated and scalable infrastructures that are essential to driving the design and development processes involved in the manufacturing of products and commodities.

The continuous integration of DevOps and Agile technologies with the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) software ensures better collaboration and communication among the various departments in a manufacturing unit and helps develop the desired applications without any bugs. Therefore, the adoption of the best continuous integration tools in the manufacturing vertical is expected to grow at a significant rate during the forecast period.

Others

The other verticals in the continuous integration market include government, logistics and transportation, and energy and utilities. With the advent of digitalization, every vertical has realized the importance of deploying software solutions to stay ahead in the competitive market. IT teams across verticals require web-based team communication, collaborative codes, document management, and traceability. Government bodies are focused on improving the agility, collaboration, and transparency among various departments using DevOps tools for software delivery. Continuous integration tools providers, such as CloudBees, offer continuous integration/continuous delivery solutions for government agencies to help federal, state, and local governments easily tackle time-to-market pressures by keeping projects on track and on budget.

In the energy and utilities vertical, companies face issues while transitioning to renewable and low-carbon energy trends, which involve altering the way in which companies source energy and distribute it to their consumers. Moreover, the high demand for solar power energy has led to the adoption of smart and responsive grids, which has increased the demand for digitalization across the vertical. This vertical is also experiencing growth in the adoption of digital technologies, which is expected to create the demand to deliver an enhanced experience. Therefore, the best continuous integration tools can help streamline the overall application delivery process.

Companies in the logistics and transportation vertical are adopting transportation management systems, solutions, sensors, AI platforms, and software to tackle the difficulties associated with the management of shipments. Additionally, with the advent of automation, cloud computing, analytics, and IoT technologies, the need for fast-paced decision-making and transparency has become more evident, which has encouraged logistics and transportation companies to invest more in the development of new applications and up-gradation of the existing ones. All these functionalities require the quick delivery of software applications, which, in turn, is increasing the demand for continuous integration devices.

What are a few use cases of Continuous Integration Tools?

1. Project Objective- To manage and streamline the development of increasingly complex automated software by adopting continuous integration practices to accelerate time-to-market

Description- CloudBees offers Jenkins Platform to increase automation and project status visibility while improving build stability and software quality. The company has taken an initiative to help software engineers deliver high-quality software faster and with improved quality by adopting continuous integration practices with CloudBees Jenkins Platform.

Benefits- Decrease in build process time, large scale deployment kept on track by expert support and improvements in visibility and transparency with Jenkins Operations Center.

2. Project Objective- To reduce build time from 40 minutes to less than 10 minutes and to scale the engineering team from 300 to 900

Description- Buildkite enabled Shopify, a global commerce platform, to auto-scale its build servers to match its engineering team’s peak demand. The company’s agent architecture allows Shopify to take full advantage of cloud cost reduction features, provides a much large compute capacity for the same cost, and allows a smooth transition from AWS to Google Cloud.

Benefits- A 75% reduction in build wait time and an increase in continuous integration speed for the same budget.

3. Project Objective- To push out new applications and features faster and to streamline development processes by simplifying management

Description- AWS provides a platform for the development, test, and production environment. AWS services also offer the engineer a fully automated, continuous integration, and delivery system. AWS provides CodePipeline, a continuous delivery service that enables fast, reliable application updates.

Benefits- Decrease in the development time, simplified development approach, and improved development system transparency.

4. Project Objective- To have reduced testing time as well as the automated parallel testing process

Description- Semaphore support offers a solution to reduce build time that will average 50 minutes at the time. The solution is Semaphore Boosters, a solution that records test times for a given file as well as splits up the tests into multiple commands based on the number of jobs users want to run.

Benefits- Average build time for the entire test suite is reduced to 13 minutes and developers can get feedback form faster.

5. Project Objective- To support rapid business growth and onboard new customers quickly

Description- Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform simplifies application deployment and accelerates delivery. Also, it offers support for continuous integration processes and release management. Red Hat also provides solutions, namely Red Hat JBoss Middleware and Ansible, which offer support integration, provisioning, configuration management, and deployment automation.

Benefits- Increased scalability and reliability to support business growth, accelerated sales cycle, and time-to-market by supporting and automating continuous integration process.

6. Project Objective - To reduce maintenance costs and bottlenecks, the reduced team set up time.

Description- Buildkite is a continuous integration tools that combines the power of users to build infrastructure with the convenience of a managed, centralized web UI. This tool would help users to reduce setup time for new build pipelines and centralized clusters greatly reduced their operations overhead.

Benefits- Faster builds, tighter feedback loops, and easier adoption of new tools and practices.