Open source vs. Open core:

Travis CI loves the open-source community. Validated open-source projects are free to test, forever. It’s their way of giving back. Travis CI is not, however, open-source itself. There is a free plan that can accommodate small projects and small businesses, but it’s still a SaaS solution that is, for all intents and purposes, paid. When Harness acquired Drone, it committed to keeping it open-source forever. Harness recently reaffirmed its investment in the open-source solution with a massive release where a sleeker interface, new visual pipeline builder, governance and security features, and real-time debugging tools were added. While this feature-rich version is free, there is also a paid version of Drone that provides access to enterprise support and more integrations and features yet. Additional features include secrets management options, autoscaling, custom plugins, and more.

Self-Service (Simple):

One of the great things about Travis CI is how easy it is to get started. Once you get set up and configured, you can be running unit tests in as little as 5 minutes. Travis CI supports 35 languages and supports cloud-native and traditional apps. Travis CI could, however, improve when it comes to documentation, integrations, and plugins. While it is a good basic tool, it does currently lack modern features more experienced users have come to expect, especially when it comes to security and governance, and overall flexibility/customization for complex projects. On the other hand, Drone offers the same easy “get started” experience where you can be up and running in 5 minutes. Drone also benefits from roughly 150 containerized plugins, profoundly extending the functionality of the tool. Drone also scales on demand. All of this means less person hours spent by engineers maintaining the tool or waiting for slowness to resolve, and more time on what matters: getting that code to artifact.

Secrets Management:

Travis CI’s only secrets management option is to encrypt secrets. It doesn’t offer any third-party integrations. Drone offers encryption on its open-source version. Meanwhile, the enterprise version offers these alternatives: encrypted, native, or external, through third-party providers such as AWS Secret Manager, Kubernetes Secrets, and HashiCorp Vault. No matter how you want your secrets to be handled, Drone can rise to the occasion.

Pricing:

Travis CI offers a free plan that aligns well with small personal projects or small businesses just starting out. Paid plans are priced by concurrent jobs, billed monthly or annually (at a discounted rate). There is also an enterprise plan that provides an on-premise alternative to SaaS, but it’s a fairly hefty plan that sells licenses in packs of 20, at $8,000 per pack. This pricing structure is fairly new, and we wanted to share a user review on this new structure: “It costs us more than half of the credits to make just one build. The price per minute is just insane. When the credits are done, then the CI will just block.” Profound insight into Travis CI’s costs – the provided link above has many reviews pointing out the new price change and how they are switching to a different CI tool. Drone, on the other hand, is open-source software and is available for download. It also has an enterprise version that is extremely feature-rich, but does have pricing attached to it. To familiarize yourself with enterprise pricing, please contact sales.

*Please note: Our competitors, just like us, release updates to their products on a regular cadence. We keep these pages updated to the best of our ability, but there are bound to be discrepancies. For the most up-to-date information on competitor features, browsing the competitor’s new release pages and communities are your best bet.

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