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Compare anything, side by side
Pick up to 4 ci/cd and we'll lay out their specifications side by side. Apples to apples only — once you pick the first item, the picker locks to its category so you don't end up comparing Selenium with OWASP Top 10.
×
GitLab CI
GitLab
Open Source
Commercial
Free Tier
Cloud / SaaS
Self-Hosted
Integrated CI/CD pipelines inside GitLab.
Visit website ↗
×
CircleCI
CircleCI
Commercial
Free Tier
Cloud / SaaS
Cloud-native CI/CD with strong parallelisation.
Visit website ↗Side-by-side
Specification comparison
Schema: Tools. Missing values are marked "Not available yet" — those are next on our research list.
Rating key:
Positive / Free / Fast
Limited / Moderate
Difficult / Steep
Informational
| Attribute | ||
|---|---|---|
| Pricing |
Free
(Community Edition); Premium $29/user/mo; Ultimate $99/user/mo
|
Free
(6,000 credits/mo); Performance from $15/mo
|
| Free tier / OSS |
Yes
— GitLab Free tier with 400 CI/CD minutes/mo
|
Yes
— 6,000 free credits/month
|
| License |
MIT
(CE) / Commercial (EE)
|
Commercial
(SaaS) / Server (on-prem)
|
| Testing type | CI/CD | CI/CD |
| Languages / SDKs | YAML pipeline definition | YAML pipeline definition |
| Supported platforms | SaaS (gitlab.com), self-hosted (Linux, Docker, Kubernetes) | SaaS, self-hosted (CircleCI Server) |
| Parallel testing |
Yes
— parallel jobs
|
Yes
— test splitting & parallelism
|
| Speed |
Fast
— SaaS runners + self-hosted option
|
Very fast
— optimised resource classes
|
| Key integrations | Kubernetes, Terraform, Prometheus, Jira, Slack, 1000+ integrations | GitHub, Bitbucket, Slack, Jira, AWS, GCP, Azure |
| Learning curve |
Easy
to moderate
|
Easy |
| Community / Support |
Very
large — 30M+ users
|
Large;
active developer community
|
| Maintained by | GitLab Inc. | CircleCI |
| First released | 2012 | 2011 |
| Latest version | See website | See website |
| Best suited for | Teams using GitLab wanting all-in-one DevOps platform | Cloud-first teams needing fast, scalable CI/CD |
| Official site | docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ ↗ | circleci.com ↗ |
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