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Migrate your CI/CD from Jenkins to Semaphore

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

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Semaphore vs. Jenkins

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    Speed up the feedback loop from idea to customer and back again

    Remove obstacles to continuous delivery

    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:

    • Clutter-free UI
    • Effective pipeline visualizations
    • Help getting on board
    • Support with continuous testing and deployment

    Eliminate non-differentiating heavy lifting

    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:

    • auto-scaling or hybrid cloud solution
    • No maintenance
    • More focus on building great products

    Increase developer productivity & happiness

    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.

    • Saves over 500 human hours per month (see whitepaper)
    • Faster builds
    • infinite on-demand capacity to test in parallel
    • smart pipeline optimization features

    Standardize CI/CD across teams and projects

    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fragmented, with each team having their unique instance with challenges that include brittle configuration and outdated plugins.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:

    • CI/CD configuration is stored as code
    • runs on cloud native, iOS, and Android environments
    • centralized permission management

    “I’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.”

    Ben Peterson, Principle Software Engineer

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    Compare Semaphore vs. Jenkins

      Semaphore Jenkins
    Product type
    SaaS SaaS with autoscaling resources No
    Hybrid Hybrid: run Semaphore agents on customer-managed infrastructure, use cloud-based UI Yes
    Fully on-premises Yes Fully hosted and configured by the end user
    Setup
    Standard project set up a in a few clicks Yes. Authenticate with Git provider, select repository, import repository as project Provision machines for CI/CD, install Jenkins on them, install plugins for Git integration and any additional functionality
    GitHub support Yes Yes
    Bitbucket support Yes Yes
    Gitlab support Pending Yes
    Standardized product Yes. All users use the same product maintained by Semaphore No. Piece together functionality from plugins with varying syntax, documentation, and best practices
    Graphical pipeline configuration Yes. Workflow Builder: point-and-click interface to create and edit pipelines No
    Standardized configuration language Yes. Declarative YAML configuration for all features No. 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 Yes. CLI can manage projects and do everything the UI can. No. CLI limited to managing Jenkins instances
    Ease of Maintenance
    No maintenance required for hardware Yes No. End user maintains the machines
    No maintenance required for platform software Yes. Official VMs and Docker images are refreshed weekly, include popular OSS tools out-of-the-box No. Requires dedicated person / team (SPOF)
    No maintenance required for user-facing product Yes. All UI, including real-time and historical pipeline visualizations, logs, and test results is made and continuously improved by Semaphore No. End user maintains individual plugins with varying release cycles and support
    Declarative configuration of services Yes. Supported via CLI No
    Hot upgrades without downtime Yes. Use new product features as soon as they are released No. Troubleshoot plugins for interoperability and deal with breaking changes
    Operating system support
    Linux, macOS Yes Yes. Jenkins can run anywhere but end user must assemble their own hardware and software stack
    Windows, ARM Yes. Via self-hosted agents  
    Performance
    Guaranteed desktop-grade performance Yes. In SaaS version

    No. Depends on user’s choice and plugins
    Autoscaling parallelism Yes. Serverless model No. Manually add/remove machines and installations to scale capacity
    Allocate more CPUs and RAM to complex jobs Yes. Change one line of configuration No. Manually tweak plugins or upgrade machines to increase performance
    Each job runs in a pristine, isolated environment Yes No. Jobs share disk space which may cause issues
    Scalable dependency cache Yes No
    Built-in artifacts store Yes No
    Built-in Docker registry Yes No
    Debugging feedback loop Yes. Fast debugging via SSH access to both running and finished jobs No. No direct SSH access to job environment, only log inspection
    Permission management
    Mirror permissions from GitHub Yes. Via official GitHub App No. All users given full access by default
    Role-based access Yes. Admins can limit access to deployment, secrets No. Manual setup of permissions
    Okta / SAML for LDAP integration No. Only SaaS version supports Okta Yes. Okta / SAML for LDAP supported via plugin
    Declarative configuration of permissions No No
    Security
    Application-level security Yes No. Single-layer of security around the fleet of Jenkins machines
    Runtime isolation Yes No. Additional security created must be created manually
    IP allow list Yes No. Depends on end user configuration
    Audit logs Yes Yes. Available via plugin
    ISO 27001 certificate Yes No. No standard certification available, varying levels of security for OSS plugins, must be audited accordingly
    SOC 2 certificate No. Pending No
    Support
    Email-based account and technical support Yes No
    Video call support Yes No
    Support SLAs Yes No
    Custom solution engineering Yes No
    Dedicated customer success manager Yes No
    Private Slack channel Yes No
    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

    “We 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.”

    Krzysztof Szromek, CTO @ Exlabs

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    Contact us for a demo and migration plan

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

    César Luiz dos Anjos, CEO na Asseinfo

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    Case studies

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