https://github.com/drone/drone
We went from Drone -> CircleCI -> Jenkins in the last two years. Jenkins feel opaque and hard to reason about, periodically dies for no _good_ reason and the UI is atrocious.
Drone itself was fine, as a minimal feature set. I think the docs are offline now, but it's fairly straightforward.
You must be doing something wrong then. I run a Jenkins cluster with hundreds of automated pipeline build/deploy jobs and the master node never dies. (It's also the only node up and running 24/7) You should be offloading your work to build agents.
I was merely a poor steward in the early days out of necessity. My era of tinkering ended once we moved to CircleCI.
To be fair, it was very stable, though UI was awful. Nowadays we use GitLab (selfhosted) and love it.
I have only been tasked with fixing setups on Jenkins, and a friend of mine has spoken at length about how difficult things are to set up.
Some of that is based on the difficulty in getting a Jenkins configuration into source control. For CircleCI, I know, the CI configuration goes in a configuration file that gets checked in to the repo.
Another big part is making sure the development environment is sane, and replicating it. When we were dealing with Jenkins, Docker didn't exist yet. I assume that build slaves running inside Docker are a thing now? Because that's another thing that CircleCI gives us.
Honestly, though, this is just a thing that's easier to outsource if you can. Running a Jenkins server on your own is valuable if you have business reasons ("Code cannot go onto a third party server!") or if you're doing testing that involves connected devices (build and deploy to this Android device, then run tests...). But apart from that or a similar motivation, why bother maintaining a server when services are available for fee or cheap?
I do wish Jenkins to be a little less high-maintenance, like say having a postgres backend and a docker image for the master. I hate having a different backup routine for each thing.
Upgrade to an additional container is just $25. \
I have hit numerous bugs with their website as well where stuff doesn't load, builds kick off into infinity, when I transferred a repo everything broke, ack!
Furthermore, I am frustrated with their pricing, they go from free to $50/mo for the next upgrade tier, that seems like a crazy jump to me. I would gladly pay $10/mo or so for another container or 2x parallelization. The issue is being a single developer I rarely would save any time and the $50/mo is just too steep.
Finally, when I tried to build a justification case for my manager to pay the $50/mo, I wanted to use data from their CircleCI Insights which shows how long your builds are queued on average and some other important data points. But you cannot access these insights from a free account. Seems like that info should be available and prominent to help people understand the cost-savings they might receive by upgrading. I emailed support and asked for a one-time data point for that statistic to build the case as I was considering upgrading and they said sorry, nothing we can do for you. Is their goal to make money and have happy customers? If so they aren't doing a great job of it.
Overall a lot of frustrations with the platform and this just adds more fuel to the fire.