Migrate your CI/CD from Jenkins to CircleCI

Join thousands of developers who have made the switch from Jenkins to CircleCI. With CircleCI, you can:

  • Automate testing and deployment
  • SSH into failed builds for easy debugging
  • Automatically maintain third-party integrations with orbs
  • Manage multiple projects with reusable config
  • Use workflows for simple job orchestration
  • Host CircleCI on-premise or in your private cloud

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CI/CD designed for speed, at scale

Save time on maintenance and management

Instead of managing user permissions across multiple tools and platforms, CircleCI helps teams eliminate redundancy and reduce risk by handling everything on the VCS. Use orbs to further simplify project management and to easily set up and maintain third-party integrations.

Increase productivity

On Jenkins, teams of on-call engineers often spend their time installing dependencies and troubleshooting complex issues. On CircleCI, all builds start in a clean environment and can be quickly debugged with SSH access. And, features like parallelism and customizable RAM and CPU help teams maximize build efficiency across projects.

Reduce operational overhead

Plugins are required to do almost anything in Jenkins, even to check out a Git repo. CircleCI saves you the trouble of managing and installing plugins, because all core CI functionality is built-in, including first-class integrations with GitHub and Bitbucket.

Create consistency across projects

Treating CI configuration like any other source code makes it easy to manage and share. All environment variables you store inside CircleCI are encrypted at rest and sent to your build containers using SSH. And, with orbs, you can condense repeated pieces of config into a single line of code to use across multiple projects.

Compare CircleCI to Jenkins

Setup

CircleCI
  • VCS authentication directly from the UI
  • Import repositories as projects*
  • Declarative YAML configuration for all features, defined in a single config.yml file
  • Reusable code snippets to simplify multi-project setup and maintenance
Jenkins
  • Install Jenkins on CI machines and plugins for VCS integration, UI, and any additional functionality
  • Troubleshoot plugins for cross-functionality
  • String together functionality from plugins with varying syntax and best practices
* CircleCI can also be installed on your own machines, behind an existing firewall

Maintenance

CircleCI
  • Use out-of-the-box solutions to easily set up and maintain third-party integrations
  • Use new features as soon as they are released
Jenkins
  • Maintain machines and individual plugins with varying release cycles and support

Performance

CircleCI
  • Allocate more CPUs + RAM to complex jobs
  • Cache dependencies, Docker layers, and more to speed up build time
  • No slow-downs from individual features
  • SSH into failed builds for fast debugging
Jenkins
  • Dependent on efficiency of plugins
  • Manually tweak plugins or upgrade machines to increase performance

Permissions

CircleCI
  • Add users via VCS authentication
  • Automatically adopt permissions from VCS
Jenkins
  • All users given full access by default
  • Manual setup of permissions

Security

CircleCI
  • Application-level security + runtime isolation
  • Additional security layers protect source code, environment variables, and outputs
  • SOC 2 Type II and FedRAMP certification
Jenkins
  • Single-layer of security surrounding CI fleet
  • Additional security created manually
  • Varying levels of security for OSS plugins

Hosting Options

CircleCI
  • Choose Cloud for best in class Cloud Native CI/CD and the option to use self-hosted runner for your own infrastructure
  • Choose Server to self-manage with complete customization and control
Jenkins
  • Basic cloud CI features, Self-hosted runner functionality at early stage development with infrequent release cycles
  • Intended primarily for self-hosted use cases, with time intensive maintenance

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Host CircleCI on-premise or in your private cloud

Choose our cloud-hosted option for increased flexibility, instant access to feature releases, automatic upgrades, and more. Or, host CircleCI on a private server for maximum security and maintenance control.

Automated testing and deployment

CircleCI automatically runs your pipeline in a clean container or virtual machine so you can test every commit. Passing pipelines can be set up to automatically deploy to various environments so your product goes to market faster.

SSH into failed builds for easy debugging

Quickly find and solve problems using SSH access into failed builds, or run jobs in your local environment to make it easy for your team to find bugs and solve issues before they hit production.

Use orbs to set up and maintain third-party integrations

Orbs are reusable snippets of code that help automate repeated processes, speed up project set up, and make it easy to integrate with third-party tools. Use an orb to deploy to AWS or GCP, manage K8s, test code coverage, and more.