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Migrate your CI/CD from Jenkins to Semaphore

  • βœ”οΈ Modernize aging code delivery processes
  • βœ”οΈ Accelerate deployment frequency with faster builds
  • βœ”οΈ Free up developers’ time for more valuable work

With Jenkins, CI/CD is a black box locked in a silo. Without access, it’s hard for developers to focus on quality, shorten test cycles, and ensure safe deployment. With Semaphore, you get:

  • βœ”οΈ Clutter-free UI
  • βœ”οΈ Effective pipeline visualizations
  • βœ”οΈ Help getting on board
  • βœ”οΈ Support

There are entire books written about running Jenkins, and for a reason. It’s free to use but puts the burden of managing, securing, and scaling CI/CD squarely on your team. With Semaphore, you get:

  • βœ”οΈ auto-scaling or hybrid cloud
  • βœ”οΈ No maintenance
  • βœ”οΈ Focus on building great products

The data is in: after switching to Semaphore, an average team of a dozen engineers saves over 500 human hours per month (see whitepaper). The reason? Faster builds, infinite on-demand capacity to test in parallel, and smart pipeline.

  • βœ”οΈ Saves +500 human hrs/mo
  • βœ”οΈ Faster builds
  • βœ”οΈ Capacity to test in parallel
  • βœ”οΈ smart pipeline optimization

Jenkins adoption is typically fragmented, with each team having their unique instance with challenges that include brittle configuration and outdated plugins. With Semaphore, you get:

  • βœ”οΈ CI/CD config as code
  • βœ”οΈ Runs on multiple environments
  • βœ”οΈ Permission management

β€œI’ve been doing CI/CD for more than 15 years. Semaphore is hands-down the best product I’ve used. An incredibly flexible platform, but without the open-ended bloat of Jenkins. It’s extremely intuitive and easy to navigate.”

Principle Software Engineer

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Compare Semaphore vs. Jenkins

  Semaphore Jenkins
Product type
SaaS βœ…
β“˜SaaS with autoscaling resources
❌
Hybrid βœ…
β“˜Hybrid: run Semaphore agents on customer-managed infrastructure, use cloud-based UI
βœ…
Fully on-premises βœ… βœ…
β“˜Fully hosted and configured by the end user
Setup
Standard project set up a in a few clicks βœ…
β“˜Authenticate with Git provider, select repository, import repository as project
βœ…
β“˜Provision machines for CI/CD, install Jenkins on them, install plugins for Git integration and any additional functionality
GitHub support βœ… βœ…
Bitbucket support βœ… βœ…
Gitlab support Pending βœ…
Standardized product βœ…
β“˜All users use the same product maintained by Semaphore
❌
β“˜Piece together functionality from plugins with varying syntax, documentation, and best practices
Graphical pipeline configuration βœ…
β“˜Workflow Builder: point-and-click interface to create and edit pipelines
❌
Standardized configuration language βœ…
β“˜Declarative YAML configuration for all features
❌
β“˜Multiple DSLs: pipelines are defined in one of two Groovy-based domain specific languages, one for simple declarative tasks, and one for more complex scripting.
Command-line interface βœ…
β“˜CLI can manage projects and do everything the UI can.
❌
β“˜CLI limited to managing Jenkins instances
Ease of Maintenance
No maintenance required for hardware βœ… ❌
β“˜End user maintains the machines
No maintenance required for platform software βœ…
β“˜Official VMs and Docker images are refreshed weekly, include popular OSS tools out-of-the-box
❌
β“˜Requires dedicated person / team (SPOF)
No maintenance required for user-facing product βœ…
β“˜All UI, including real-time and historical pipeline visualizations, logs, and test results is made and continuously improved by Semaphore
❌
β“˜End user maintains individual plugins with varying release cycles and support
Declarative configuration of services βœ…
β“˜Supported via CLI
❌
Hot upgrades without downtime βœ…
β“˜Use new product features as soon as they are released
❌
β“˜Troubleshoot plugins for interoperability and deal with breaking changes
Operating system support
Linux, macOS βœ… βœ…
β“˜Jenkins can run anywhere but end user must assemble their own hardware and software stack
Windows, ARM βœ…
β“˜Via self-hosted agents
 
Performance
Guaranteed desktop-grade performance βœ…
β“˜In SaaS version
❌
β“˜Depends on user’s choice and plugins
Autoscaling parallelism βœ…
β“˜Serverless model
❌
β“˜Manually add/remove machines and installations to scale capacity
Allocate more CPUs and RAM to complex jobs βœ…
β“˜Change one line of configuration
❌
β“˜Manually tweak plugins or upgrade machines to increase performance
Each job runs in a pristine, isolated environment βœ… ❌
β“˜Jobs share disk space which may cause issues
Scalable dependency cache βœ… ❌
Built-in artifacts store βœ… ❌
Built-in Docker registry βœ… ❌
Debugging feedback loop βœ…
β“˜Fast debugging via SSH access to both running and finished jobs
❌
β“˜No direct SSH access to job environment, only log inspection
Permission management
Mirror permissions from GitHub βœ…
β“˜Via official GitHub App
❌
β“˜All users given full access by default
Role-based access βœ…
β“˜Admins can limit access to deployment, secrets
❌
β“˜Manual setup of permissions
Okta / SAML for LDAP integration ❌
β“˜Only SaaS version supports Okta
βœ…
β“˜Okta / SAML for LDAP supported via plugin
Declarative configuration of permissions ❌ ❌
Security
Application-level security βœ… ❌
β“˜Single-layer of security around the fleet of Jenkins machines
Runtime isolation βœ… ❌
β“˜Additional security created must be created manually
IP allow list βœ… ❌
β“˜Depends on end user configuration
Audit logs βœ… βœ…
β“˜Available via plugin
ISO 27001 certificate βœ… ❌
β“˜No standard certification available, varying levels of security for OSS plugins, must be audited accordingly
SOC 2 certificate Pending ❌
Support
Email-based account and technical support βœ… ❌
Video call support βœ… ❌
Support SLAs βœ… ❌
Custom solution engineering βœ… ❌
Dedicated customer success manager βœ… ❌
Private Slack channel βœ… ❌
Licensing model    
  SaaS subscription: Semaphore provides a typical cloud computing pay-as-you-go plan and Enterprise plans with per-seat price Jenkins is open source and free to use, but lack of support and maintenance add to total cost of ownership

β€œWe eliminated waiting times at the end of each sprint, which were usually very challenging as we deploy a lot of changes on the last day, with Semaphore’s automatic CI scaling. We are now paying 38% of what we would be paying somewhere else and experience is great.”

CTO @ Exlabs

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β€œIt may seem that Jenkins is cheaper than Semaphore. But, after a while, the benefits are very clear: your team becomes more efficient.”

CEO na Asseinfo

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Case studies

These teams have switched from Jenkins to Semaphore. Discover their ROI:

β€œWe were using Jenkins to build the old system, and it was hard to maintain and quite painful. We looked at other hosted CI services, but they were very unreliable. When we found Semaphore, we got our application up and running pretty quickly. We now use it for all projects.”

CTO at Simply Business

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β€œSemaphore allows us to build anywhere from two to twenty branches in parallel, each one in a threaded environment. We had thousands of tests that were running for a really long time and with Semaphore we got the build to run in under 20 minutes.”

QA Lead at 500px

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β€œSemaphore 2.0 allows us to build, tag, push, and run Docker images easily. This makes building a powerful pipeline where we can deploy to our Kubernetes cluster fairly easily and quickly.”

Senior Software Engineer

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