Marg Semaphore

Easy to configure projects and see the status of builds.

The UI is very confusing-- specifically the operation to deploy builds to production. What I want is a button for each potential deployment that pulls the latest successful build and lets me deploy that with one click.

Trying to aggregate CI and deployments for many different apps. It's been okay for this but the deploy mechanism and history are confusing.

The price is far cheaper than travis and makes the product perfect for prototyping an app that requires a lot of iteration. Additionally I found several useful guides for integrating the service with AWS / Firebase, which made the setup process fairly quick.

I have seen multiple consecutive days of downtime. While these were apparently the result of an upstream provider, it made little difference to me as the end user, because I simply could not deploy my app. Stability and reliability in a CI service it probably even more important than ease of use and for Semaphore's price I would happily put up with some degradation in UX, in favor of reliability. I make the same tradeoff for other services and find it worthwhile on my shoestring budget.

Look at the uptime stats and community support consider whether it is worth the tradeoff to you for the price.

I'm prototyping an app and need testing and deployment on every check-in, for which Semaphore is well suited. Additionally I only have a handful of repositories that require check-in, so Semapohre is allowing me to operate on a very low budget while still having all the benefits of quick deployment. Through the published guides I've also discovered AWS tools such as CloudFormation that I did not know about and are well suited to my purposes. When funding it less of an issue however, I'll be likely to move to Travis because of its relatively higher stability.

What do you like best?

What do you dislike?

I love how simply and easy to use Semaphore is... Whenever I started up a small project I usually default to Semaphore as my CI tool of choice. Other tools may have more features, but 9/10 times I just need a solid, easy to use, quick to set up tool with all the basic features. The price is right too and they're adding new features all the time.

As mentioned previously, it's not as fully featured as some of the more advanced tools, but frankly I hardly have ever needed more, except when working for large companies with tens of thousands of tests and teams of 30+ engineers working on the codebase at the same time.

If you want simple, affordable, and easy to use, go for Semaphore. I've only worked on 2 codebases that really required massive parallelism and enterprise level support... I'm sure Semaphore would work with you on that, but I recommend it if you want to get up and running quickly.

Semaphore fills the need for a simple, no frills service to run and monitor my spec suite. I typically work in Ruby/Rails and this is a great service that has always met my needs. Their Heroku integration is nice as well and makes getting up and running as simple as can be.

* the machines they use are very fast - we did a comparison of execution time of our suite across a couple of competitors, and Semaphore was significantly faster than the rest;

* good Docker support, built-in AWS ECR integration and flexible configuration - we build our Docker images on Semaphore using available caching capabilities, we run our tests against the built image, we push the image to the ECR and then it's used for deployment, of course triggered automatically;

* even back when we were still using a free plan, customer support was exceptional - quick to respond, helpful, kind and competent.

The web interface for navigating between builds and branches could be better - there's a couple of places I always need to think about when using it. Also, the build view is not refreshed consistently - sometimes it's stuck on some setup step in the browser while I can see that my build is done and a deploy was triggered.

There is a good free plan and the customer support is great, so reach out if you have any problems configuring it.

It allowed us to build the CI/CD pipeline we wanted.