Is it time to switch CI/CD platforms? 7 warning signs
Senior Technical Content Marketing Manager
Every engineering team eventually faces this question: “Is our CI/CD setup actually helping us, or is it getting in the way?”
The answer isn’t always obvious. CI/CD problems often develop gradually: small issues become accepted workarounds, and those workarounds become standard practice. What once worked well for your team might not fit your current needs or scale.
The decision to evaluate new tooling usually builds over time as pain points accumulate and priorities shift. If you’re starting to wonder whether your current platform is the right fit, here are seven concrete signs it might be time to evaluate your options.
1. Developer complaints about build reliability are becoming routine
When developers start every standup with “the build is flaky again” or “my pipelines are taking forever to run,” you’re not dealing with occasional hiccups. You’re seeing systematic reliability issues.
Flaky tests that pass and fail randomly. Inconsistent build times with no clear pattern. Mysterious failures that require manual investigation. Developers building workarounds instead of trusting the system.
What started as minor annoyances become major productivity drains that compound across your entire engineering organization. Unreliable pipelines create delays that cascade through product delivery timelines.
2. Platform teams are buried in requests as developers bypass the golden path
Platform teams exist to amplify your developers’ capabilities, not to act as a help desk for broken pipelines. If your platform engineers spend more time troubleshooting than building, something’s wrong.
As the organization grows, the support burden multiplies. Each new project adds configuration challenges, and each new developer runs into workflows that should have been self-serve. When friction builds, teams start stepping off the golden path: creating their own pipelines, duplicating work, and undermining the standardization the platform was meant to provide.
When platform teams get stuck in reactive mode and developers start working around them, the platform stops driving the business forward and momentum is lost.
3. Your pipelines are too brittle to trust and too complex to scale
CI/CD should be a stable foundation for delivery. But when your pipelines evolve into sprawling, over-engineered systems, they create fragility instead of speed. Every quick fix, plugin, and custom integration adds another failure point until the system itself becomes the bottleneck.
When this happens, you may find yourself pouring more time and money into keeping your setup alive than delivering features to customers. All too often, that means paying a premium vendor to hold the system together, even as it grows more fragile with each patch and workaround.
No matter how much you spend, a fragile pipeline can’t deliver reliability or scale. Builds still fail unpredictably, deployments still stall, and your team is left firefighting instead of shipping. What should be an accelerator for the business becomes a drag on velocity and a constant source of frustration.
4. AI-assisted development is exposing workflow bottlenecks
Teams using AI coding assistants operate at a different pace. Where traditional development meant a few carefully crafted commits per workday, AI-assisted and agentic development means a constant, 24/7 stream of change.
Traditional CI/CD systems weren’t designed for this pace. Ten-minute build times feel reasonable for human-paced development but become bottlenecks when AI can generate and test solutions in seconds. Your pipeline ends up being the bottleneck that slows down AI-enabled development.
The teams using AI most effectively will ship faster and develop features quicker. If your CI/CD platform can’t keep up with AI-assisted workflows, you’re limiting what your organization can do with these tools.
5. New security and compliance requirements reveal platform gaps
Audit requirements, security incidents, or new regulations can suddenly expose gaps in your CI/CD platform.
You might not be able to easily track which dependencies are in production. Your platform could lack the access controls needed for compliance certification. Or your current system might make it difficult to enforce security policies consistently across all teams.
These gaps aren’t always obvious during normal operations, but they become critical blockers when compliance deadlines approach.
Security and compliance are basic requirements for modern software delivery. If your platform can’t support these natively, teams end up building workarounds that often increase risk instead of reducing it.
6. Platform investments need better foundations than current tools provide
Your organization is investing in internal developer platforms, standardization initiatives, or AI-powered development workflows.
But these investments require CI/CD pipelines that can support modularity, observability, and policy enforcement at scale.
Legacy systems or tools tightly coupled to specific version control systems often can’t provide the flexibility these modern initiatives require. You end up building elaborate workarounds or accepting limitations that undermine the value of your platform investments.
If your CI/CD foundation can’t support these goals, your other platform investments won’t deliver the results you expect.
7. Leadership is questioning engineering velocity and tooling ROI
When business leaders start asking pointed questions about deployment frequency, cycle time, or tooling costs, it usually means CI/CD bottlenecks have become visible at the organizational level.
Maybe release schedules are slipping or competitors are shipping features faster. Leadership may even be scrutinizing the budget and wondering why tooling costs keep increasing while delivery speed stays flat.
Once CI/CD performance becomes a boardroom topic, the pressure to improve increases dramatically. Having a structured evaluation process ready means you can respond with actual data instead of scrambling for explanations.
What to do when you spot these signs
Recognizing these warning signs is the first step. But turning that recognition into action requires a structured approach.
The most successful CI/CD evaluations start with clear criteria and a systematic process. You need to document your current pain points, define your future requirements, and create a framework for comparing alternatives objectively. Most importantly, you need buy-in from stakeholders across engineering, security, and leadership before you invest time in vendor evaluations.
A Request for Proposal (RFP) helps anchor this process by capturing your technical and organizational needs in a format that vendors can respond to consistently.
CircleCI’s evaluation guide covers this process, from building the business case to conducting a thorough RFP to running proof-of-concept pilots. It includes templates for gathering requirements, questions that reveal real differences between platforms, and scoring frameworks that help you make decisions with confidence.
The guide also provides practical tools you can use immediately:
- Complete RFP template with critical questions to ask
- Scoring framework for objective vendor comparison
- Implementation roadmap for smooth transitions
If you’re seeing these warning signs: Download the complete CI/CD evaluation guide and start building the case for change with a structured, stakeholder-friendly process.
FAQ
Q: How do I know if our issues are serious enough to justify switching platforms? A: If two or more of these warning signs apply to your organization, it’s worth starting a formal evaluation. The goal isn’t necessarily to switch but to understand whether your current platform can meet your needs or if alternatives would serve you better.
Q: What’s the biggest risk of staying with a CI/CD platform that’s holding us back? A: The hidden cost is opportunity cost. While you’re working around limitations and managing technical debt, competitors with better tooling are shipping faster, adapting to market changes more quickly, and taking advantage of AI-powered development workflows that your platform can’t support.
Q: How long does a thorough CI/CD evaluation typically take? A: With a structured process, most evaluations take 6-8 weeks from initial requirements gathering to final decision. This includes stakeholder alignment, vendor evaluation, proof-of-concept testing, and building the implementation plan.
Q: Should we evaluate multiple platforms or focus on one strong contender? A: Compare 2-3 serious candidates that align with your technical and organizational requirements. This gives you meaningful comparison data without overwhelming your evaluation team with options that don’t fit your core needs.
