How we stack up against the competition
Over the last decade or so there has been an explosion in tools that tackle continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD). There has also been a significant move forward in terms of hosting applications/services mostly using cloud providers.
The solutions are quite compelling, though decisions about one against the other aren't that simple. In general, specific solutions for CI/CD require knowing if you want a SaaS or an On-Premise installation. The latter requires IT and/or DevOps knowledge depending on how many users the solution will serve. A SaaS solution is much simpler in that regard, though both share the issue that you need to know how to configure what you need. Each solution brings its own vocabulary, schema, configuration, authentication, and so on that someone needs to figure out and make work as well as maintain.
The hosting landscape presents its own challenges. In the current environment, it's a must to know about networking, security at a basic level for each resource that you'll use from your cloud provider besides knowing how to utilize those resources. Knowledgeable people are scarce in the current market and that adds an extra layer of complexity.
Let's dive a bit into our competition's capabilities and how we stack up to them. This is by no means a deep dive into other companies' features, be careful and do your own research if you're planning to get any service from them. Also, if you have any questions or need extra accommodation within Xtages drop us a line here.
| Feature \ Competitor | Xtages | GItLab | GitHub | CircleCI | Jenkins |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Self-service, with no installation, infrastructure setup or maintenance? | Yes | On-prem:No Cloud:Yes | Yes | On-prem:No Cloud:Yes | No(self-hosted) |
| Unlimited number of users | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes |
| Does it have OOTB capabilities for CI? | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| Does it have OOTB capabilities for CD? | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| Can you host your app/service? | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| Can you customize your deployment script? | (coming soon) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Builders specs |
3 GB RAM
2 vCPU
|
3.75 GB RAM
1 vCPU
|
7 GB RAM
2 vCPU
|
Pick and choose based on your credits | It depends on the specs of the agent |
| Build minutes | 2.5k - Starter plan | 10k - Premium plan | 2k - GitHub Free | N/A (they have a credit-based system) | Unlimited |
| Feature \ Competitor | Xtages | Heroku | AWS/GCP | Digital Ocean |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| App Monitoring OOTB | (coming soon) | Yes | No | No |
| App Logging collection OOTB | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| 1-click App deploy | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| 1-click App rollback | Yes | Through the CLI | No | No |
| 1-click db provisioning | Yes | Through the CLI | No | No |
| Script-less deployment? | Yes | No | No | No |
It's worth mentioning that some solutions are very capable, however, they require quite some effort for the maintenance of pipelines as the applications/services increase, if they are a SaaS solution. An on-premise solution requires investing more time and money for installation, maintenance, and monitoring.
Xtages blends the capabilities of CI/CD with hosting services as a PaaS. Our goal is to streamline the development process by giving users an integral solution that gives them best practices out-of-the-box through minimal configuration.