Their documentation seemed weird.

It seemed like if you wanted to self-host your own CI builder with their agent, it was still limited to 1 parallel build on their free plan?

Is that true?

With Gitlab, if you bring your own runner, there's no limitation like that AFAIK (I've never done this yet because I never surpassed 2k build minutes a month) but I glanced their docs.

Yeah, that's annoying. However, there's an undocumented loophole: you can have multiple agents on the same machine and they can all run in parallel even if you didn't buy an extra private pipeline. We recently had a build server with four SSDs, one agent on each, and they could all run in parallel. It worked fine.

Too much trouble when GitLab actually has an open source version. Also AutoDevOps is AMAZING!

AFAIK one agent = one build. So just start several agents, they're only a few MB RAM

Open source projects get unlimited self-hosted agents. Let me know if you aren't experiencing that. I'll make sure it's clear in the docs and the website. jepling at microsoft dot com.

Also I believe they are the only option that offers free build agents on Windows, Linux and Mac.

As someone who uses the paid Azure Pipelines agents I can say I really like it generally but their hosted build agent performance is ... adequate ... at best.

I'm a product manager on Azure Pipelines. I'd like to learn more about your pipeline so we can improve the performance of our hosted build agents. It's something we're improving right now. Feel free to email me. jepling at microsoft dot com

I noticed Travis builds complete faster once they're running, by something like 20% in my case, but that's more than offset by having twice as many parallel builds by default. Never dug into why it's slower, though, at a guess something to do with the filesystem

I'd like to learn more about why Azure Pipelines was slower for your build. Feel free to email me. jepling at microsoft dot com.