Bamboo vs Jenkins : Which CI/CD Tool is Better? [Table included]

Bamboo vs Jenkins! both are continuous integration automation tools. Both of them are widely used by agile teams to quicken and make their process more efficient. Bamboo and Jenkins can also assist agile teams to regularly share their work.
However, which one to use if they are equally good? Go through this comparison blog and find out.

What is Continuous integration?

Continuous Integration is a process progressively being adopted by software development teams to enhance the frequent sharing of their work with the rest of the team to fasten and enhance their software development process.
Every time integration takes place it is verified/tested by a build that includes test cases. This results in early detection and correction of bugs and streamlining and fastening the development process.

What is Jenkins?

Jenkins is a renowned open-source CI/CD tool. It is an automation server that will help in the software development process. It is also a Java-based tool that assists the development team to focus on continuous delivery.
Another feature of Jenkins is that it’s a server-based system that runs in a servlet ( a small java program that runs in a web server) containers. For instance, Apache tomcat
Features of Jenkins

• Jenkins is easy to install across OS
• Jenkins makes sure that your code is well through continuous integration
• Increases code coverage by facilitating transparent dev
• Hundreds of plugins are available

What is Bamboo?

Bamboo is a continuous integration tool used by development team members to continuously share their work with the team. Bamboo services were originally available as both in-house and cloud computing services. But later cloud computing services were discontinued.
Top Features of Bamboo

• Can run multiple builds in parallel
• Build failure analysis, including a stack trace
• Offers REST API
• Great Plugin Support
• Supports build tasks for build tools
• Supports testing tools
• Customizable build notifications
• Supports importing data from Jenkins

Major differences between Bamboo vs Jenkins

Let us have a look at the major differences between Bamboo and Jenkins

• Open Source

Jenkins is open-source while Bamboo is a paid tool. Bamboo charges money; based on the user’s requirements. It can be quite costly for high-end projects and projects having various versions.
In short, Jenkins is completely free and Bamboo is not. Bamboo starts with a minimal cost of as low as $10 but this cost rapidly grows to a massive $880 a year.

• User Community

Being completely free Jenkins has a huge user community. It adds an advantage to look out for various upgrades, updates, and bugs. But searching for some solutions can be a hectic process as a user might have to search through a large number of threads to look out for a solution.
While Bamboo is a paid service and hence has a smaller user community. But it offers professional support and is completely user-friendly and can be customizable.

• Plugins

Being an open-source tool, Jenkins supports a massive library of plugins. It has a library of over 1400 plugins. You can readily use these plugins to customize Jenkins and to extend its functionalities.
In the case of Bamboo, the number of plugins is rather less.  But not to miss on the quality of the plugins. The plugins that Bamboo offers are almost perfect with no bugs.

• Cloud Support

With gradually, the world depending upon cloud services, comparing the two continuous integration tools – Bamboo and Jenkins on the basis of this feature is worth it.
Both Jenkins and Bamboo initially supported both on-premises and cloud services. But later on, Bamboo discontinues its cloud version. Hence current scenarios only Jenkins offers cloud support while Bamboo does not.

• Setup Complexity

Another important feature to discuss is setup complexity. While Bamboo comes with an easy to use user-interface and full professional support for your queries, Jenkins misses on all these features.

Read also : 15 Best Mobile App Testing Tools For 2019

Jenkins has a pretty complex user interface that is even less attractive than Bamboo. Jenkins does not offer any professional support to set up your tool or to resolve any query, whereas Bamboo offers pretty good professional support to its customers. But being open-source, missing on these features is completely justifiable for Jenkins.

• Integration with other tools

Atlassian Bamboo is renowned for its integration capability with other Atlassian tools like JIRA and Bitbucket. You can easily and quickly integrate such tools with Bamboo.
Though Jenkins can also integrate with such tools, thanks to a massive number of plugins Jenkins supports, integration is rarely required. However, If you are dealing with big projects, the integration could be very inconvenient.

• Project Support

Bamboo is a preferred choice for large enterprise projects with extended budgets, Projects with massive software systems and supporting various versions can be easily handled by Bamboo. But for simpler and stand-alone projects Jenkins is a better choice as it is open-source.
A Quick Look on the Differences:

Which is better?
With new processes like Agile and DevOps out-casting age-old software CI/CD tools to fasten and streamline your software development process. Bamboo vs Jenkins for sure is the two most popular CI/CD tools available in the markets.
Picking up one among the two as a better tool is practically not possible. To pick up on one of these two tools entirely depends upon your requirements.

If you have a standalone software system and have a constrained budget, then definitely Jenkins is a better pick for you. But if you are looking for an extremely professional setup to deal with enterprise software systems having multiple builds and versions, then Bamboo is a better option for you.
So it’s time to analyze your requirements and pick the best suited CI tool to fasten and make your software development process more progressive.