Bamboo Reviews

Ability to interface easily with other Atlassian applications.

It allows a controlled process in which to build software.

Version control for plans is currently not really possible. This is pretty much the deal breaker for me and why I'm moving away from Bamboo.

The Upgrade process is also clumsy and requires manual steps. I'm not a fan of tarballs.

3 years.

You may need to upgrade in steps if you are upgrading a relatively old version.

At one time we used to have issues with system stability. You may need to tinker with your systems heap settings.

You are limited by the number of agents you are willing to buy. This means all your teams end up building on the same agents or worse, the master itself.

This is the second deal breaker for me and why I'm currently advocating to move to a different build system.

Atlassian support is usually pretty good in my experience.

They need to work on their upgrade paths and deployments. If you fall to a few versions behind you may end up doing a multi-version installation. Not fun.

The license is the worst. It costs the most. In addition to that we run it on a very beefy server (HP DL360 G8 with 24G of ram). I would not run this software on subpar hardware.

Pros:

- Integrates well with Atlassian products

- Nice Modern Interface

Cons:

- Agents are limited by the license

- No method to provide version control for Build Plans

- It's expensive

- Most plugins cost $$$

Personally I'm in the process of moving away from Bamboo. Sure it looks nice, but I need flexibility. If you plan on creating a build server for each of your teams or projects, don't use Bamboo and use Jenkins instead. It has a richer plugin base, no limit on agents, and allows version control of plans and configuration easily. It's also open source software so the cost is much lower. Maintaining Bamboo is also a chore, not so with Jenkins which is distributed as a RPM, DEB, and now Docker container. Bamboo I'm still stuck downloading a tarball.

We are very fond of the flexibility it offers in terms of setting up our builds. We have a wide variety of components we need to build which often require custom actions or manipulations using in house technology. Bamboo allows us to set this up quite easily by the flexible configuration features it includes.

Secondly we really like the integration of the build aspect and deploy aspect. One of the recent major releases included this feature to link build and deploy projects together allowing a deployment pipe-line to be setup completely in Bamboo. This makes the status of deployments very visible and also allows for easy follow up and even rollback in case a deployment causes too much havoc.

Thanks to Bamboo we are able to build changes made by development quite quickly and allow them to deploy to our internal environments when needed (as well as automated during the night). This significantly reduces the effort required to get something into test.

The fact that all builds use a unified setup and infrastructure makes it much easier to control and adapt the ever increasing number of builds.

We are lacking proper support for branched builds using multiple source repositories. The current approach is quite clunky (or non-existent) but it seems there is something in the pipe line for the end of the year according to a recent post on the Bamboo Jira.

We have been using Bamboo for about 6 years now

Not at all, over all those years we only had a handful of issues and that's probably because we always take each new update directly.

No, we never encountered any serious regression. For the few cases we encountered bugs they were fixed in a reasonable time interval.

Scaling out a build system is not always easy, but thanks to the remote agent technology we are able to scale out and add nodes in a transparent way.

We use a 3d party for our license management, which makes it hard to judge this but we never had direct interactions with Atlassian Customer support.

Pretty good once you get trough the initial levels of the support team, it can take a while before you are able to prove that there's a genuine issue.

We came from Jenkins back in the day, I recall our most important reasons to switch where the enterprise readiness of Bamboo and its integration in the Atlassian stack (Jira and others).

Bamboo is very easy to deploy, all it takes is extracting the distribution and a JRE to run it. This also goes for the remote agents which install by running a JAR which already contains the configuration for communicating with its master.

We implemented in house.

That would be 100%, the time saved in development is enormous.

We started out using only a number of agents and moved to a bigger setup using many remote agents over the years. The cost depends on the agents used and amount of boxes deployed to run them on.

Only Jenkins, see previous answer.

Plan before you start, Bamboo is 'only' that which automates. One should have a decent design of how the build needs to work internally and have that (scripts, servers, descriptors ...) in order before attempting to automate on a large scale.

Secondly, don't be afraid to change things to you application or pipeline to help the automation to be more efficient - for example we replaced massive chunks of hard SQL from the build scripts by a webservice to avoid dependencies to JDBC in our builds.

This is a part of the CI/CD. We use this tool to move into production. 

It does automation which saves time so that people don't have to waste time. We save around 20% on time. 

It's one of the best solutions in this line of work. We have many Atlassian products. We use Bamboo, JIRA, Service Desk, and some other Atlassian plugins. We like that it's easy to integrate into each other. It's a suite of services. 

It doesn't take up other resources. It's very efficient. 

It's a little outdated. It's three years old. 

I have only used Bamboo at my current company and I've been there for a year now. 

It is very stable. We have experienced issues but there is alway support.

We are upgrading to the latest version because of the scalability. 

I usually solve any problems we have by myself. If for whatever reason there isn't any information available online we contact their support and they get back to us within hours. I opened around five to ten tickets with them. 

They have very stable pricing. The license is 120,000 per year for the license and maintenance.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. Not a ten because the GUI is old I always have to find the right plugin.

My advice to someone considering this solution is that if you have the money, buy it. 

• Integration with Atlassian products like Jira,Crowd, and Stash
• Easy to setup
• Price

• With Bamboo's integration with Jira, we were able to update build status and test reports to Jira bugs/tasks.
• In Stash, we were able to improve the pull request review standards by being able to review the build and test reports.
• Integration with Artifactory, helped us in auto updated libs and artifacts.
• APIs were helpful for creating customizations.

• Ease of use.
• It needs "re-build/Trigger build" switch from Stash Pullrequest.
• More 3rd party plugins to support IDEs.
• Integration of older plugins with newer version of Bamboo.
• More options for deployment plans
• Configuring tools to agents (Had to do it manually). It would be nice have sharing from server.
• -Docker support
• Limited options with SSH plugins, can't use options to it

Two to three years.

No issues with deployment.

Yes, Regular server/agent being down.

Yes, It needs to allow multiple plans to run on a agent(at same time). Dedicating one whole agent isn't fair, I know we have to buy more agents, but in-terms buying and maintaining more infrastructure isn't scalable either. .

Never used it. Had a decent responses from open forum.

Never used it.

Yes. since we wanted to keep Atlassian suite all-around.

Easy. Just like other Atlassian products.

We got the product for a cheap price, so its alright.

We initially got 5 agents for around $2000 excluding infrastructure setup. Now we are using docker containers to maximize the mileage on them.

If you are looking for good integration with Atlassian products and then this is the tool.

I find the solution quite easy to use. 

One of the big things that made us choose Bamboo, is it seamlessly integrates its APIs into NetSuite, which is our main ELP system.

The fact that it's integrated within Oracle products, and that it can be managing statutory people in our organization, and the features and functionality are all huge selling points. 

We felt Bamboo was a simple overall tool, and that it was also cheaper than Oracle's products at the time, which is why we chose it.

The solution needs to support more customization in the training. What's offered is pretty generic. They need better training and should offer more guidance.

I've been using the solution for about a year.

The solution is pretty stable.

The solution is scalable. We have about 400+ users on it currently. We use it on a daily basis, but I don't know if we plan to increase usage at this time.

We have our own in-house team that helps troubleshoot any issues we might have. If they can't resolve it, they may go to the Bamboo help desk.

I wasn't really involved in the implementation process so I can't really comment on it. 

We have two administrators on the solution currently.

We use the cloud deployment model.

I'd recommend that solution. Everything structure and systems-wise is quite customizable.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

The deployment mechanism was neat, and I liked how it allowed you deploy the same release to multiple environments. I also thought the ability to branch build and deployment jobs without needing to use templates or updating job configuration could be useful. Plus the new Salesforce plugin looked interesting despite the fact you had limited control on how the SF package is deployed.

• Logging, no integration with Octopus
• Build time variables did not have ability to select from a list of value
• No ability to customize Build version
• TFS plugin had no local workspace editing of checked out files, as all files coming from TFS have read-only attribute turned on by design
• No history view column adjustment
• Password variable values were not concealed within GruntJS logs
• Watching build log GUI loses focus at build completion making debugging difficult
• Mediocre .Net Code Coverage support and reporting.

These observations were part of a multi-department, one month evaluation where we decided to go with a different product in the end.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

We were using TFS for build automation. TFS proved to administrative to maintain and customize build templates. Plus we were planning to move to Git and found Git's interface within TFS/Visual Studio lacking in comparison to other Git clients.

It was straightforward, although, Bamboo initially creates its main install folder in the home directory of the current user. Even though Bamboo has a 'bamboo.home', Bamboo organizes its different library/build-time/resource component folders separately in the configuration and modifying those proved intensive in comparison to TeamCity and Jenkins where there's is only one 'Home' folder.

In-house.

We evaluated TeamCity and Octopus.

While the community may grow over time, please ensure your current/future processes are not hindered by Bamboo's faults. Bamboo is likely to improve with time, it may be advisable to use a different solution until the product grows a bit more mature.