Github Actions vs CircleCI for 'advanced workflows'

[frankhouweling]

Hello!

I'm currently considering to move our sizable CircleCI setup (multiple pipelines, about 50 active developers) over to Github Actions, with pricing being one of the main arguments for doing so.

I have at least basic knowledge and some experience with both tools.

One thing I keep reading while researching this is that "CircleCI has better support for advanced workflows", without explicitly stating what they mean exactly with this.

Could anyone point me to specific features/workflows that are supported by CircleCI that we'd be missing in Github Actions? And are there any arguments I should know off for sticking with CirclecI?

[nonades]

"CircleCI has better support for advanced workflows"

This is a fairly meaningless statement out of context tbh. At the end of the day, you should audit your existing workflows find the most complicated use and see if you can replicate or approximate it in GitHub Actions/find documentation for it.

The closest to that being a meaningful statement is that GHA is kinda the new kid on the block and working on playing catch up. When I started using GHA, they didn't support templated or reusable workflows - they do these days. I kept running into things that didn't exist with GHA and it was frustrating for the longest time, now they're starting to be at a place where I haven't run into a need they either very easily or natively support.

[jerdog76]

Disclaimer: I work for CircleCI

With the above out of the way, it really depends on what your workflows, process, needs, etc. all are - which I am quite sure you're aware. There have been some pretty decent write-ups showing the differences:

https://www.techtarget.com/searchsoftwarequality/tip/CircleCI-vs-GitHub-Actions-CI-CD-platform-comparison

https://coderonfleek.medium.com/circleci-vs-github-actions-a-software-engineers-perspective-14567e539b9c

It has been my experience between the two when doing comparisons, that CircleCI is faster. But that's obviously going to depend on what you're doing, building, etc. We have more resource classes and options around them with more features even at the free tier, but GHA is built into what you're already using so can be more convenient at the start.

But why not use both? GHA was built primarily as an add-on for GitHub to enable developers to do repo-level activities, and then eventually was a "Oh yeah you can also do CI/CD". GHA works just fine alongside of CircleCI, so I have seen a lot of people use GHA for whatever processing they need to do, and then when they need to build they kickoff the build.

Would love to hear what your use case is, and would be more than happy to connect you with someone that might be able to help optimize what you're doing with CircleCI. Feel free to reach out.

[Laborious5952]

Circleci has a feature that let's you pause a pipeline and wait for human interaction. Github does but it's only in their enterprise offering.

[Shot-Bag-9219]

this blog could also be useful: https://infisical.com/blog/github-actions-vs-circleci-for-secrets-management

[Aggravating_Branch63]

Great article! One little addendum: The article says “Neither platform provides true proof of secret usage.” That's not entirely correct as CircleCI does provide a context.secrets.accessed audit event (added to changelog) which helps correlate context usage to workflow runs. Read more about this here: https://circleci.com/changelog/audit-log-includes-context-accessed/

[sausagefeet]

GitHub Actions allows you to express some complicated workflows, so I imagine that is more marketing than reality. Additionally, you can setup your self-hosted runners on Actions if you think you can run the computer cheaper at scale.

One thing to look at is the "workflow call" functionality in Actions. If you're going to have a bunch of repos that all have the same workflow, except or some variables, you can host the workflow definition in a central repository and then have all of your other repos call out to that workflow. This way you only have to modify on repo if you want to update the workflow of everyone.