As a software team, you want to release quality updates quickly. However, choosing the right continuous delivery tools can be tricky with so many options on the market. In this guide, we’ll look at the ten best continuous delivery platforms.
Whether you’re a small team or a large enterprise, you'll discover the ideal solutions to fit your needs and budget. With the exploding demand for frequent software releases, these tools have become must-haves, and by the end of this article, you’ll know exactly which tool fits your needs best. Let’s get started!
Top 10 Continuous Delivery Platforms in 2024
Not all continuous delivery tools are created equal. The right CD platform can simplify software release processes and not add unnecessary complexity.
1. Facets
Facets, built to simplify continuous delivery across hybrid cloud infrastructure, is first on our list of top CD tools. Trusted by businesses like Purplle, Treebo, Capillary Tech, and many more, Facets accelerates release velocity through intelligent workflow automation while maintaining compliance and security standards.
The platform consolidates fragmented release processes into a unified system, helping teams achieve faster, safer delivery lifecycles with declarative, infrastructure-as-code.
With an innovative approach combining deployment automation and release orchestration into a single solution, Facets delivers an elevated user experience for delivering resilient, self-operating infrastructure at scale.
Key Features
- A single integrated platform covering deployment automation and progressive delivery.
- Supports a variety of app environments: VMs, containers, and serverless setups.
- Compliance guardrails and controls for regulatory-driven use cases.
- Integrates with existing CI tools for end-to-end automation.
Let’s go over the features in further detail.
As a feature-rich and highly extensible platform, Facets has robust deployment automation, release orchestration, and delivery lifecycle management capabilities.
Infrastructure Automation
Facets helps Ops manage all aspects of infrastructure provisioning, app deployment, and progressive delivery workflows from a single place. Devs define environments using Facets’ no-code automation to get to production faster.
- Supports all major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure), VMware, and bare metal.
- Blueprints for Docker, Kubernetes, serverless databases, and more.
- Drift detection: automatic or scheduled infrastructure scans.
- Custom health checks and error handling.
- Native secret management through environment variables, config maps, and parameter stores.
- Cost optimization: quotas, autoscaling, spot instances.
Progressive Delivery
Facets provides advanced release pipeline orchestration capabilities leveraging infrastructure automation under the hood. The platform promotes builds across multiple environments with approval gates, manual judgment steps, and integration with notification channels.
- Model environments, deploy targets, and pipeline stages are all as code.
- Manual judgment steps with configurable approvals.
- Integration with APM tools for test gates and canary analysis.
- Customizable release dashboard showing pipeline stage status.
Compliance & Governance
In regulated industries like financial services and healthcare, the ability to embed compliance controls directly into the software delivery lifecycle is critical. Facets bakes in several compliance-oriented capabilities:
- Isolation policies for data security.
- Drift detection to maintain consistent infra over time.
- Immutable infrastructure principles.
- Integrates with SSO providers for access control.
- Policy guardrails on pipeline execution.
Who Should Use Facets?
Facets is recommended for:
- Medium to large engineering teams running business-critical systems
- Companies undergoing digital transformation or cloud migration initiatives
- Organizations with complex deployment targets like hybrid cloud, multi-region, etc
- Heavily regulated industries requiring strict compliance guardrails
2. Jenkins
As an open-source automation server, Jenkins provides continuous integration and delivery capabilities catering to the entire software development lifecycle. Jenkins offers an incredibly flexible way to create deployment pipelines tailored to teams’ needs.
With over 1,800 plugins on the Jenkins marketplace, developers can customize and extend built-in functionality to support niche use cases. Thanks to its distributed architecture, Jenkins also makes it possible to distribute workloads across multiple machines.
Key Features
- Highly customizable deployment pipelines that enable the modeling of complex workflows with parallel stages, conditional logic, loops, and manual intervention.
- Distributed architecture and horizontal scaling to support workload distribution across multiple systems for improved scalability.
- A robust community plugin ecosystem allows the integration of all CI/CD tools, including version control, containerization, logging, testing frameworks, and notifications.
- Supports pull requests and incremental delivery for implementing continuous integration and deployment.
- Integrates with major source code repositories and test automation tools like Git, JUnit, and Selenium through plugins.
Who Should Use Jenkins?
The flexibility and customization of Jenkins appeals most to developers and engineers who:
- Need to build complex, multi-stage pipelines with advanced logic.
- Work on projects requiring niche tool integrations.
- Prefer open source and don’t require enterprise-grade support.
3. CircleCI
As one of the most widely used SaaS CI/CD platforms, CircleCI simplifies software building, testing, and deployment for engineering teams. Trusted by forward-thinking brands like Spotify, Coinbase, and Samsung NEXT, CircleCI processes over 1.8 million daily builds across its hosted cloud infrastructure.
The tool emphasizes intelligent parallelism and caching to optimize build performance. CircleCI also offers reusable configuration templates called Orbs that simplify setup. Other features include a local CLI, IDE plugins, and context-rich insights dashboards.
Key Features
- Cloud-based build infrastructure for rapid execution times leveraging distributed processing.
- Advanced workflow modeling with configurable compute classes and automatic parallelization.
- Convenient CLI, IDE plugins, context switcher, and APIs for integrating build into developer environments.
- The insights dashboard shows build timings, job durations, failure rates, and statuses for diagnosing issues.
- Integrates with popular version control systems like GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab.
Who Should Use CircleCI?
CircleCI suits engineering teams that:
- Require rapid builds performed in the cloud.
- Seek accelerated test cycles.
- Use GitHub, Bitbucket, or GitLab for version control.
- Value out-of-the-box simplicity over extreme customization.
4. GitLab CI/CD
Embedded directly within GitLab’s DevOps platform, GitLab CI/CD enables seamless, continuous integration and delivery without needing an external tool. Trusted by leading brands like NASA, CERN, and Alibaba, GitLab CI/CD allows you to implement robust pipelines while avoiding integration overhead.
Since CI/CD is bundled into GitLab’s single application, teams gain a streamlined view of issue tracking, planning, coding, building, testing, and release processes. Other benefits include unified permissions, no third-party fees, and tight version control system integration.
Key Features
- Natively integrated into the GitLab platform, allowing unified permissions, access controls, and security policies between CI/CD pipelines and other GitLab tools.
- Tight coupling with GitLab issues, boards, and planning tools provides visibility for pipeline and software project management.
- Pipeline definitions stored in repository YAML files enable version control for the release process and infrastructure-as-code principles.
- Supports streamlined Kubernetes deployments with auto cluster integration, automated manifest configuration, and in-platform instance scaling.
Who Should Use GitLab CI/CD?
Integrated GitLab CI/CD tools best suit:
- Teams using GitLab for software project management.
- Groups who value consolidated tools share access controls.
- Organizations running or migrating applications to Kubernetes.
- Multi-cloud environments across AWS, GCP, Azure, and on-prem.
7. GitHub Actions
GitHub Actions provides integrated continuous integration and delivery within GitHub’s popular source code management platform. GitHub Actions makes automating software workflows triggered by code commits, PRs, issues, and more straightforward.
Since GitHub Actions workflows are stored as code within repositories, they help improve collaboration and version control of release pipelines.
Key Features
- Workflows are defined as code in YAML format to enable infrastructure-as-code principles for release pipelines.
- Distributed processing across self-hosted or GitHub-hosted runners allows flexible and scalable execution.
- Built-in artifacts and caching capabilities to optimize workflow performance for lightweight pipelines.
- Share workflows across repositories for easy reusability of predefined procedures and promote standardization.
Who Should Use GitHub Actions?
GitHub Actions suits teams that:
- Maintain source code on GitHub already.
- Seek deep customization based on community actions.
- Prefer defining infrastructure-as-code workflows.
- Have advanced build scenarios leveraging matrices.
8. Travis CI
As one of the first CI/CD platforms tailored for open-source language projects. The tool empowers developer velocity through a cloud-based distributed pipeline execution engine designed for lean integration.
Travis CI helped pioneer the integration of CI directly into GitHub via pull requests and was considered the easiest to adopt today's GitHub-centric CD solutions.
Key Features
- Cloud-based distributed pipeline execution infrastructure for flexible scalability.
- Pull request status checks and gates to enforce quality gates before merging code changes.
- Flexible YAML configuration minimizes overhead for simplified and lightweight pipelines.
- Built-in Docker support and CLI debugger to simplify container-based deployments and ease troubleshooting.
Who Should Use Travis CI?
Travis CI is suitable for teams that:
- Maintain projects on GitHub and need PR checks.
- Seek simple, lightweight pipelines
- Use Docker containers or deploy to cloud platforms.
9. TeamCity
Created by JetBrains, TeamCity provides an enterprise-grade CI/CD server enabling automation across build, test, and deployment stages. TeamCity offers robust functionality focusing on scalability, security compliance, and cross-tool integration.
Configurable build triggers, template reuse across projects, clustered infrastructure support, and breadth of 3rd party integrations position TeamCity as a top choice for managing releases for large multi-team environments.
Key Features
- Template-based builds are reusable across projects to standardize and accelerate pipeline creation.
- Distributed server architecture helps configure a scalable pool of build agents for distributed processing.
- Broad tool integrations and extensibility through plugins adapt to practically any tech stack.
- Building chain visualization across projects provides end-to-end traceability across pipelines.
- Integrated Kubernetes cluster management simplifies infrastructure provisioning and deployment orchestration.
Who Should Use TeamCity?
TeamCity suits teams requiring:
- Already work with JetBrains tools
- Scalability across distributed agents.
- Strict compliance controls.
- Support for complex build chains.
10. Bamboo by Atlassian
Developed by Atlassian, Bamboo is a continuous integration and deployment server designed for Ops and development teams managing on-prem or cloud-hosted applications. Bamboo meshes with existing Atlassian toolchains while offering robust CD functionality like multi-stage pipelines, intelligent builds, and automated rollbacks.
Bamboo’s simplicity in setting up agents, reusable configuration templates, and native integrations with tools like Jira and Bitbucket cement its position as a leading CI/CD choice for Atlassian-centric organizations.
Key Features
- Pre-built integrations with Atlassian tools like Jira and Bitbucket allow simplified identity management and traceability.
- Intelligent build caching and parallelism minimize redundant work and accelerate pipelines leveraging distributed processing.
- Automated rollbacks and capability tests safeguard against failures and drift through self-healing mechanisms.
- Reusable configuration templates standardize and simplify model creation across pipelines.
- Agents auto-update, keeping parity with the server, reduces administrative and maintenance overhead.
Who Should Use Bamboo?
Bamboo is an excellent fit for teams leveraging:
- Atlassian apps like Jira or Bitbucket
- Cloud platforms like AWS, Docker, and Kubernetes
- Automatic rollback and testing capabilities
What’s the Best Fit For Your Team?
Finding the right continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) tool for your team is tricky. There are many options, each with its strengths and weaknesses. When evaluating tools, there are five main things I'd think about:
Here are five essential factors to consider when evaluating CI/CD solutions:
- Tech Stack Alignment: If your team mainly uses niche or proprietary tech, find a tool that specializes in those areas.
- Hosting Requirements: Self-hosted gives you more control and customization, and cloud-based is easier to set up. Consider which makes more sense for your team down the road.
- Customization vs Out-of-Box: Customizable tools allow more advanced modeling if you have diverse projects. But out-of-the-box tools can work well if you need basic CI/CD capabilities.
- Compliance and Security: If you work in a regulated industry, tools that enable controls around access, encryption, and auditing are a must.
- Team Skills and Culture: Consider your team's current skills and culture. A tool that aligns with what your team knows or is open to learning will see much smoother adoption.
The right CI/CD tool balances all these technical and human elements. While it may take some trial and error, you'll be automating releases quickly if you find that sweet spot.
Adopting Continuous Delivery Best Practices
Integrating leading CI/CD tools into development toolchains marks only the beginning of maturing release consistency and long-term reliability. Let’s discuss several cultural best practices that complement robust technology solutions:
Make Testing a Priority
Testing can't be an afterthought. To prevent defects and reduce rework, test early, test more.
Use different testing types—unit, integration, smoke, manual, and performance tests. This "shift left" approach catches issues way sooner.
Automate Manual Tasks
Any manual step in your deployment process can fail or cause delays. Identify areas needing human involvement and script them—tools like infrastructure-as-code and policy-as-code help.
Roll Out Changes Incrementally
Big releases are risky if things go south. Use incremental rollouts like canary or blue/green deploys instead. This gives you control if and when issues pop up.
Incentivize Reliability
Emphasize metrics like uptime, recovery times, and defect rates over velocity. This keeps teams focused on building secure, resilient systems.
Conclusion
With continuous delivery now essential for modern software teams, choosing the right automation platform is crucial yet challenging.
Facets.Cloud consolidates robust deployment automation and industrial-grade release orchestration into one integrated, highly extensible platform. This gives developers infrastructure-as-code guardrails securing even the most regulated industries through configurable policy controls.
The result? Faster feedback cycles, simplified cloud migration, and proactive drift detection across complex hybrid infrastructure. Facets strikes the right balance for your stack, workflows, and compliance needs.
Want to know how your workflows can improve with Facets? Schedule a personalized demo and experience how it accelerates release velocity through intelligent automation while maintaining security standards.
