Alternatives to Thoughtworks Go

Question

We were exploring the possibility of using Thoughtworks Go to help improve the build / deployment / release process here, but due to the price factor and what you actually got, we decided against it.

I was wondering if there are alternatives to Thoughtworks Go around? They can be commercial or open source, I do not mind.

Answer 1

Go has just been released as open source - see http://www.thoughtworks.com/news/go-continuous-delivery-now-available-as-free-open-source

Answer 2

It really depends on what you want to achieve.

If you want to implement Continuous Delivery and, therefore, deploy pipelines (from dev to production itself), then GO is the only tool, I believe that the level of vision at the moment is at the moment.

OTOH, if you are just looking for a CI server, then the free version of GO works well, like the free version of TeamCity, Jenkins and Atlassian Bamboo. I think that none of the last three supports the concept of deployment pipelines as a first-class feature.

Answer 3

I could not comment on Matthew's answer, but Inedo BuildMaster is a very popular platform for this. It has slightly more features than Go, and although it is a commercial product, there is a free version that is very useful for small teams.

(Disclaimer: I work for Inedo , but have experience on both platforms)

Answer 4

I carefully looked at each continuous delivery product and found that GO was certainly the most suitable for this role. It provides a level of visual modeling for a parallel and sequential workflow that cannot be compared to any other product.

At Nordstrom, we now accept GO as our recommended continuous delivery management server. The only product that really competes is Jenkins, which most of us find too awkward to be a desirable alternative.

Now it is open source, so you don’t have to worry about licensing costs. I would suggest going back and telling your cohorts that GO is now the clear open source leader in this domain.

Answer 5

We had similar conclusions: the free version of Go, "$ 499 for annual support of the free version" and "$ 499 for 3 remote agents" were worth it, but the price jump after that (for the "enterprise" version with release management support) was astronomical.

There is an “Electric Cloud" for commercial alternatives, but it's even more expensive than ThoughtWorks.

For Open Source, there is Cruise Control (Go is the rewritten personal version of Open Source Cruise Control), Continuum, LuntBuild, Anthill, etc. These are mostly continuous integration systems (that is, more focus on startup than managing results), but they seem to work well (I used Cruise Control and Hudson in the past with great success.)

Answer 6

ThoughtWorks Go is now open source and free - https://github.com/GoCD/GoCD