Why CircleCI is a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Cloud-Native Continuous Integration Tools, Q3 2019: speed, scale, security, and compliance

Today, Forrester Research published The Forrester Wave™: Cloud-Native Continuous Integration Tools, Q3 2019, and we are proud to announce that CircleCI has once again been named a Leader. This is Forrester’s second report on the space, and also the second time we’ve been recognized as the only standalone continuous integration provider among the pack.

The report stresses that organizations across verticals are under immense pressure to deliver software faster than before. CI/CD is a mission-critical component of making sure teams can deliver quality software quickly. That’s why we focus all of our time and resources on delivering the best experience to customers. Our focus on CI/CD as a best-in-class, standalone tool enables us to deliver the most flexibility, power, and control to organizations who need a competitive edge in their delivery process.

At CircleCI, continuous integration is not just a side business – it’s the core of our offering.

“To be really good, fast, and to provide confidence, you have to be focused. That’s why we’ve taken this deep approach around CI/CD. It’s not just spinning up compute; there’s so much intelligence that goes into it.” - CircleCI CEO, Jim Rose

Our singular focus is what allows us to build the most intelligent and performant CI/CD tooling on the market. That’s all we do. And because we believe developers’ ability to choose best-in-class tooling is so important, we invest in extensibility, making the cost of integration with other key tools easy and low.

Forrester agrees. As the report states, “Large enterprises often need to develop using multiple technology stacks that include Linux, Windows, and macOS. CircleCI’s support for these execution environments pushes its offering to the leader category.”

Here’s where CircleCI gained top marks in this year’s report:

• Support for a variety of build systems and preconfigured environments: The report states, “CircleCI provides a large number of preconfigured environments, something enterprises tell Forrester they look for to help them jumpstart their efforts to get into the cloud.” We also support developers who are building for macOS, Linux, Android and most recently Windows.

• CircleCI orbs: Last fall we introduced a mechanism called orbs that allows third-parties to provide developers with pre-made integrations for use in the pipeline. Forrester notes, “CircleCI’s orb technology allows customers to easily integrate and maintain third-party applications, creating more-resilient build pipelines.” Since launch in November 2018, orbs have been widely adopted by CircleCI users, with more than 11,000 organizations using orbs in over 28,000 projects and 5,770,000 CI/CD pipelines. The functionality, flexibility, and control that these orbs provide make CircleCI the fastest and most reliable route to achieve success.

• Support for enterprise compliance with multiple certifications such as FedRAMP: In the report, Forrester notes, “Also factoring strongly was [CircleCI’s] support for enterprise compliance with multiple certifications such as FedRAMP.” We pride ourselves on being the first CI/CD solution that became FedRAMP certified in 2018. With this authorization, the entire federal developer community has access to the CI/CD tool trusted to run more than 30 million builds per month for some of the world’s most innovative companies.

And while CircleCI was named a Leader in the report, there were a few areas that we were scored less favorably on:

• Lack of migration tools: At CircleCI, we do not believe in a “lift and shift” model or the belief that importing copied-and-pasted configuration is the best model to serve our customers. Instead, we create an intuitive configuration format and cookbooks of common patterns done right, enabling teams with experience in other CI systems to quickly migrate their pipelines. Our 900+ orbs make the repetition of common build, test, and deploy patterns in configuration and setup trivial.

• Hybrid CI: Today you can’t use our cloud to orchestrate your own build fleet, but this is on our long-term roadmap.

• Comprehensive UX: Forrester wants to see support for desktop IDEs, a WebUI that blends information and commands (GUI) in one display, and the ability to support developer collaboration through third-party tools or in the IDE or WebUI. Because config is code, using CircleCI developers can collaborate on advancing pipeline maturity just as they do on code and tests, including with PRs and code reviews.

CI/CD is all we do. And that’s on purpose: we think it’s so important that it deserves our full attention. We’ve leveraged our nine years of experience helping companies grow from startups to Fortune 500s, combined with the largest amount of build data in our nascent industry, to create the best continuous integration and continuous development tool there is, and the only one designed specifically for developers. With CircleCI, developers can spend their time doing what matters most - whether it’s building a self-driving car, a Bitcoin exchange, or the next big music platform, and doing it more quickly, more effectively, and at scale.

We hear from our customers again and again that fast feedback from CircleCI results in better decisions, better security, and higher throughput. We’re proud that this year’s Forrester Wave corroborates what we’ve known for years: development teams care about performance, they are choosy about their tooling, and they will seek out best-in-class CI/CD.