Knapsack Pro
Heroku CIhttps://www.heroku.com/continuous-integration |
TeamCityhttps://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/ |
|
|---|---|---|
| Unique feature |
Heroku Flow |
Technology awareness |
| Type of product |
SaaS |
On Premise |
| Offers a free plan |
No (partial)For CI only, the cost starts at $10 for pipeline, plus a variable amount depending on how long the build runs for (prorated per second). The servers used for CI cost $250 for a full month, which means you get about 3 hours for $1. For hosting, there's a free tier, limited to 1 web/1 worker with 512 MB RAM. One of the more annoying limitations is that free dynos are put into sleep mode after 30 min. of inactivity, which increases loading times considerably. |
YesThey offer a great free professional plan, limited to 100 build configurations and 3 build agents. From there, you pay for each aditional agent you want (discounts if you purchase more than 1 agent at a time). They also provide a free plan for open source, non commercial projects, and steep 50% discounts for startups. |
| Predictable pricing |
YesClearly defined, offers a calculator. |
YesThey have a clear list of prices per number of agents. |
| Support / SLA |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Paralellism
Every CI servers tends to address this differently (parallel, distributed, build matrix). Some of it is just marketing, and some is just nuance. For this table, parallel means that tasks can be run concurrently on the same machine, distributed means that tasks can be scaled horizontally, on multiple machines How to split tests in parallel in the optimal way with Knapsack Pro |
YesUp to 16 nodes. You can ask Heroku support to enable up to 32 parallel dynos. |
Yes |
|
Distributed builds
distributed means that tasks can be scaled horizontally, on multiple machines How to split tests in parallel in the optimal way with Knapsack Pro |
N/A |
N/ANo specific mention that we could find, but judging by the wording used it would appear that tasks can be divided accross different machines. |
| Containers support / Build environment |
YesBuilds run in isolation on new dynos (Heroku containers). Wide support via buildpacks: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/buildpacks |
YesFirst class Docker support, among others |
|
Analytics / Status overview
Analytics and overview referrs to the ability to, at a glance, see what's breaking (be it a certain task, or the build for a specific project) |
YesGreat visual overview built-in. |
YesGreat system overview, even allows building your own dashboards in order to see everything you're interested in at a glance. |
|
Management support
How easy is it to manage users / projects / assign roles and permissions and so on |
YesOne of the more mature solutions for teams on the market, Heroku Teams is available for free for 1-5 people, and comes at a cost for 6+ team members: https://www.heroku.com/pricing#team-comparison. Allows setting roles and app-level permissions with ease. |
YesAllows assigning roles, LDAP and Windows domain integrations and more. |
| Self-hosted option |
No |
Yes |
| Hosted plans / SaaS |
Yes |
No |
|
Build pipelines
A continuous delivery pipeline is a description of the process that the software goes through from a new code commit, through testing and other statical analysis steps all the way to the end-users of the product. |
YesVery easy and intuitive process that allows defining a pipeline from code commit, to code review (review apps), user acceptance testing and production deployment, via Heroku Flow. Works best if the project is also hosted on Heroku. |
YesUnlike most options in the CI/CD space, TeamCity allows defining pipelines using a Kotlin-based DSL. This unlocks a lot of potential, such as templates for common CI/CD tasks, and deep integration with various IDEs (not just JetBrains IDEs) |
|
Reports
Reports are about the abilty to see specific reports (like code coverage or custom ones), but not necesarily tied in into a larger dashboard. |
Yes |
YesSomething that stands out from the rest, allows integrating third party reports, as long as they produce HTML output. |
|
Ecosystem
Besides the official documentation and software, is there a large community using this product? Are there any community-driven tools / plugins that you can use? |
YesWide array of 3rd party add-ons available via Heroku Elements: https://elements.heroku.com/addons. Custom buildpacks are also available for almost any stack you might be using (over 5500 buildpacks available at the moment) |
YesJetBrains has a rich ecosystem of plugins in general. |
|
Specific language support: Ruby
Some CI servers have built-in support for parsing RSpec or Istanbul output for example and we mention those. Some others make it even easier by detecting Gemfiles or package.json and automate parts of the process for the developer. |
YesAlthough not specifically built in to Heroku, it's guaranteed that any Ruby specific need that might arise would be solved via add-ons, buildpacks or other integrations available. |
YesUsing what they call 'Technology Awareness', promises great intehration with Ruby projects, with features such as testing framework support, static analysis and code coverage available out of the box, with no additional work required: https://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/features/technology_awareness.html |
| Specific language support: JavaScript |
YesAlthough not specifically built in to Heroku, it's guaranteed that any Javascript specific need that might arise would be solved via add-ons, buildpacks or other integrations available. |
No (partial)Unlike Ruby, there's no first class support for Javascript, although they do advertise the fact that their large collections of plugins can cover any use case for Javascript projects: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/teamcity |
|
Integrations
1st party support for common tools (like Slack notifications, various VCS platforms, etc) |
YesThe strongest built-in integrations are with GitHub and Slack (ChatOps) but even allows integrating 3rd party CI servers in the workflow if you so require, among others. |
YesGreat cloud integrations (Google Cloud, AWS, VMWare, etc) as well as 'key' integrations (VSCode, Jira, even NuGet) |
|
API
Custom integreation is available, via an API or otherwise, it's mentioned separately as it allows further customization than any of the Ecosystem/Integration options |
YesOffers a feature rich API that allows CRUD operations on the most important features, such as promoting an app to production, or inspecting a specific pipeline. |
YesUnlike most tools, which offer just a Rest API, TeamCity provides ample opportunity for extension via plugins, their own API, and service messages (formatted messages on stdout) |
| Auditing |
Yes |
Yes |
| Additional notes |
|
Great ecosystem, with a strong focus on integration with other tools (not only JetBrains). |
you have to wait 20 minutes for slow tests running too long on the red node
CI build completes work in only 10 minutes because Knapsack Pro ensures all parallel nodes finish work at a similar time
You can even run 20 parallel nodes to complete your CI build in 2 minutes
Step 1
Install Knapsack Pro client in your project
Step 2
Update your CI server config file to run tests in parallel with Knapsack Pro
Step 3
Run a CI build with parallel tests using Knapsack Pro
Knapsack Pro in Queue Mode splits tests in a dynamic way across parallel CI nodes to ensure each CI node finishes work at a similar time. Thanks to that, your CI build time is as fast as possible. It works with many supported CI servers.
| Programming Language | Supported test runners | Installation guide | Knapsack Pro Library README / Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ruby | RSpec, Cucumber, Minitest, test-unit, Spinach, Turnip | Install | knapsack_pro gem |
| JavaScript | Cypress.io | Install | @knapsack-pro/cypress |
| JavaScript | Jest | Install | @knapsack-pro/jest |
| JavaScript / TypeScript | Any test runner in JavaScript | How to build native integration with Knapsack Pro API to run tests in parallel for any test runner | @knapsack-pro/core |
| Any programming language | Any test runner | How to build a custom Knapsack Pro API client from scratch in any programming language | - |
Do you use other programming language or test runner? Let us know.
Run tests in parallel on Heroku CI and TeamCity in the optimal way and avoid bottleneck parallel jobs.
Monthly you can save hours
and up to $
on faster development cycle.
Dynamic tests allocation across Heroku CI and TeamCity parallel jobs. Autobalance tests to get the optimal test suite split betweeen CI nodes.
Test suite split based on time execution. Generates subset of test suite per CI node before running tests.
Network issues? Not a problem, run tests anyway! Auto switch to the fallback mode to not depend on Knapsack Pro API.
Ruby: RSpec, Minitest, Test::Unit, Cucumber, Spinach, Turnip.
JavaScript: Cypress.io, Jest
API: Use native integration with Knapsack Pro API to run tests in parallel for any test runner
Other languages: How to build a custom Knapsack Pro API client from scratch in any programming language
Do you use different programming language or test runner? Let us know in the poll
Join the teams optimizing their tests with Knapsack Pro.
We've been really enjoying Knapsack Pro, it's been saving us a ton of time.
My team at @GustoHQ recently added @KnapsackPro to our CI. It's pretty sweet... It makes your builds faster _and_ (this is almost the better bit) more consistent! Thank you for the awesome tool!
— Stephan Hagemann (@shageman) September 26, 2022
This is a fantastic product, it's been a total game-changer for us.
We are using CircleCI and we noticed that builds were being limited by the slowest parallelized container. Knapsack Pro was really east to setup and we saw huge improvements right away. Thank you for making this tool!
🛠How to run 7 hours of tests in 4 minutes using 100 parallel Buildkite agents and @KnapsackPro’s queue mode: https://t.co/zbXMIyNN8z
— Buildkite (@buildkite) March 29, 2017
Knapsack Pro has helped us build an insanely fast and scalable build pipeline with almost no setup or maintenance.
Knapsack Pro saves us hours of engineer waiting time every week, and is the best solution for keeping our tests load balanced that we've used to date.
I've been playing with Queue Mode. Love it! Wow, I love how fast it goes.
Awesome to see @NASA speeds up tests with #knapsack gem in https://t.co/GFOVW22dJn project! https://t.co/2GGbvnbQ7a #ruby #parallelisation
— KnapsackPro (@KnapsackPro) April 6, 2017
I just logged into my account expecting it to say that I needed to add a credit card and was so surprised and delighted to see the trial doesn't count usage by calendar days but by testing days! This is incredible! I love it!!!
I just wanted to say that I really appreciate that small but very huge feature. Thank you for being so thoughtful :)