Bitrise Vs CircleCI: Choosing the Right Continuous Integration Tool

Mobile DevOps: Bitrise vs CircleCI

With the advent of Agile development, the frequency of releases/updates to the Mobile store has increased. The biggest advantages of Mobile DevOps are more automation, eliminating manual tasks, streamlining the CI/CD pipeline from the beginning to the end. Do you find uploading apps to the App Store and Play Store a hectic process, here are some of the tools which makes it simpler.

Bitrise:

If you don’t have previous working experience in CI/CD tools, Bitrise makes your work much easier. Bitrise has a visual configuration editor in its web app which makes the whole step easier. Each step is represented as one block in the editor. And with this, you don’t need to edit configuration files directly, you can just click through the visual editor.

Some of the top features in Bitrise,

Intuitive UI and easy to use
Customizable workflows
Hosted environment
Automatic code signing
Security with no compromise

You can add a Deploy to Google Play step in the workflow to deploy the build in the Play Store and Xcode Archive & Export for iOS, Xcode Archive & Export for iOS steps for deploying in the App Store. The above process can also be done through YAML file (bitrise.yml).Bitrise clients: Virgin Mobile, Invision, Just Eat, Zeplin, Mapbox, and more

CircleCI:

CircleCI can be configured to run very complex operations efficiently with sophisticated caching, docker layer caching. Unlike Bitrise, CircleCI uses a YAML file for configuring it. On CircleCI 2.0, this file must be called config.yml and must be in a hidden folder called .circleci. You need to write the scripts in config.yml, a simple config.yml file is shown below,

Some of the top features in CircleCI,

Up to 16-way parallelization
Ability to test many code pushes concurrently
Supports Docker
Comprehensive cache dependencies

You can fully automate the deployment of apps to stores using fastlane. We have used fastlane with CircleCI for deploying the apps to App and Play stores.

Parallelism

For some projects, we need to build several flavors of application. For these, we use parallel builds. Both Bitrise and CircleCI support parallel builds and are easy to set up. For Bitrise, you would have one workflow that initiates all the parallel workflows and waits for them to finish. This way, one container will always be used just to wait for others, which is not the case on CircleCI. That's a plus for CircleCI!CircleCI clients: Facebook, Docker, Spotify, Instacart, Udemy, Cucumber and more

Unit testing:

Earlier it was very tricky to set up Unit testing in your CI/CD servers. But now we can integrate Firebase Test lab and run your tests in the cloud using Espresso in the gcloud test environment in both Bitrise and CircleCI.

Our recommendation:

If you compare both tools, Bitrise workflow editor is a really innovative approach that saves us from .yml files and brings a simple interface which is easier to implement whereas CircleCI takes a different approach which uses yml files to config.In CircleCI's free option you get one container with 1000 build minutes per month. Meanwhile, the free option in Bitrise features somewhat limiting 10 minutes per build.Finally, if you still have not adopted CI/CD practices and you are new into mobile development, Bitrise should be your first choice.Ideas2ITAre you looking to build a great product or service? Do you foresee technical challenges? If you answered yes to the above questions, then you must talk to us. We are a world-class custom .NET development company. We take up projects that are in our area of expertise. We know what we are good at and more importantly what we are not. We carefully choose projects where we strongly believe that we can add value. And not just in engineering but also in terms of how well we understand the domain. Book a free consultation with us today. Let’s work together.

Ideas2IT Team