Most Popular CI Servers (An informal survey)

At CITCON Brussels last month, attendees were allowed to write up questions of any kind on a bulletin board and others could come by and post answer as they were moved to. One poll was: Which CI server do you use? The answers were, in order of popularity:

CruiseControl
Hudson
Anthill Pro, TeamCity (tied)

I don't have the exact vote counts, because the results were taken down before I could get the final tallies. But suffice it to say, that CruiseControl received the lion's share, Hudson a handlful, and Anthill Pro and TeamCity garnered 1 vote each.

This survey, of course, is not scientific. Despite the fact that it was a CI conference, the voters were self-selecting, and ThoughtWorks, which is the company behind CruiseControl, was well represented at the conference. (It is in fact a sponsor of CITCON.) So, high CruiseControl figures would be expected. (Even without this factor, though, I expect it would have placed first due to its quality implementation, wide industry adoption, and its considerable lead in plug-ins to various tools and packages.)

The Hudson numbers, however, are interesting and probably meaningful. Hudson is a comparative newcomer to CI. But it has been winning converts quickly due to its ease of use. If you have a small project or just want to test the waters of CI, Hudson might well be the server to use.

Anthill Pro is a high-end CI server that can be found in two versions: an OSS version and a paid version. It was not until this conference, though, that I discovered these are completely different products. They were built from different codebases and the OSS version was a one-time release that is not updated.

I was surprised that LuntBuild made no appearance, as not so long ago, its users were raving about its tremendous ease of use. Perhaps Hudson is stealing its thunder, or perhaps its users just weren't at CITCON. It's hard to say in a small poll.