What do people like?

Couldn't really find too many comments beyond the general "easy to install".

Key differentiators (according to Urbancode)

• CI
  • SCM triggered builds (an alternative to polling)
  • Distributed, multiplatform build farm
  • xUnit results exposed to API for interesting decision making
    • e.g. notify if tests-per-second metric is too low

• Build Management
  • Dependency management
    • Move artifacts between projects
    • Build when my dependencies build (a changed dep is like changed source)
    • Transitive dependency support (and conflict resolution)

• Configurable workflows
• Lifecycle Automation
  • Living builds - Build the binaries. Then test, promote, and deploy those binaries over the coming hours, days and weeks.
    • configure multiple workflows for a single "build"
    • configurable build statuses
    • configurable numbering (custom algorithims as well as multiple build numbers allowed for one build)

• • Automated deployment:
    • stage gateing
    • target environments with different properties and topologies (Dev, QA, UAT, Prod...)

• • Compliance out of the box
    • Good traceability
    • Role based security
      • LDAP, Active Directory, Kerebos, SSO, JAAS etc.
    • Answers the age old questsion, "Um... what build is in production?"

References

"We are plucking teams off of Cruise Control and putting them on our AHP3 system to centralize and standardize our enterprise effort. Cruise Control doesn't scale. AHP3 also advances the way [we] do and think about builds by introducing the idea of a 'Living Build'. No more nighly, dev QA or Prod builds. Just builds that are archived and managed, reproducible and available to run additional processes against to do things like quality gates. It can also be integrated right into the deployment process as well."  C Yanko "re: CruiseControl vs Commercial Tools" 28 Sept. 2007.

Comments

There is more emphasis on compliance and deployment related features than the other tools. In terms of features, it looks like they've covered most of what we've been thinking of. The only thing missing here is the build metrics focus of Bamboo. However, given sparse comments in the blogosphere, it's hard to assess stability, ease of use, etc. Feature list looks good, hard to say about actual experience.

Anthill has been around almost as long as we have.

Pricing:

• Free license and support for Open Source projects
• Commercial pricing is not listed and is per-developer.
  • Non-comitters may use the system without added charge.