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Snr. Devops Engineer at Point Guard Ventures
Real User
Speeds up release cycles and automatically keeps everybody apprised of project status
Pros and Cons
  • "It provides repeatable CI/CD throughout our company with lots of feedback on failures and successes to the intended audiences via email and Slack."
  • "It will benefit this solution if they keep up to date with other CI/CD systems out there."

What is our primary use case?

I've used TeamCity for many years at three different companies. This has been mainly for CI -building and testing software, but also for CD - continuous delivery and deployment. This has included .NET, Java, Ruby on Rails applications, running database scripts, and basically doing anything that can be automated.

How has it helped my organization?

It provides repeatable CI/CD throughout our company with lots of feedback on failures and successes to the intended audiences via email and Slack. This speeds up release cycles tremendously. Also, it helps when it comes to PCI/auditing (if set up correctly), as TeamCity has great security and tracking model.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable features are:

  • Build chains - it's really easy to set up all of your build dependencies
  • Snapshot dependencies and triggers - you always build the correct code as a snapshot is taken at the moment you run the build chain (i.e. no unexpected check-ins are included in your build!)
  • Templates - for setting standards and making the configuration easy and clean
  • Meta runners - sharing code 

TeamCity is very stable, is easy to set up and maintain. Once everything is configured there is almost zero time needed to maintain it.

What needs improvement?

It will benefit this solution if they keep up to date with other CI/CD systems out there. Although I think TeamCity has everything anyone would need, and covers almost every scenario, it needs to keep evolving just to appear to be in sync with others.

Also, more marketing would be helpful just to get the word out on what an amazing product TeamCity is.

Buyer's Guide
TeamCity
October 2024
Learn what your peers think about TeamCity. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: October 2024.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.

For how long have I used the solution?

More than five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

This is a very stable solution.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is easy and there is almost no maintenance.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Software Development Senior Manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Real User
It delegates the building of executable code to a machine, and it stays running and performs build regularly.

What is most valuable?

I spend less time scripting to get a build working and more time configuring TeamCity through its web-based front end.

How has it helped my organization?

It delegates the building of executable code to a machine.

What needs improvement?

More build runners and more options are needed, although I have no worries they keep improving.

For how long have I used the solution?

This is the second job I have used it at. I have used other CI systems in the past, but I have been using TeamCity around two years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

Actually, I ran into a problem and I needed to do a fresh install. TeamCity stores its configuration data separate from where it installs. so this makes upgrades smoother, but makes it harder to start with a fresh slate. The problem was the data directory of the service account was rerouted because it was a 64 bit OS to SysWOW64.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No, it stays running and performs build regularly.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

For our usage, it has scaled well to our needs.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

10/10 - their service is very professional and prompt.

Technical Support:

10/10 - their service is very professional and prompt, and their staff really wants to solve your problems.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I had used CruiseControl.NET in the past. It was useful once running, but painful to initially setup, and we used word of mouth and articles showing comparisons with other frameworks.

How was the initial setup?

Just installing it with one agent is a breeze. The starting free license comes with three build agents, which, if you install them all as services, takes a little modifying of config files and running of batch files.

What about the implementation team?

I implemented it.

What was our ROI?

Yet to be calculated. I am trying to automate the release of deliverables to free someone's time up.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Start with the free license it has decent room for one group.

What other advice do I have?

Start small. Start with just doing builds before executing tests.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
TeamCity
October 2024
Learn what your peers think about TeamCity. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: October 2024.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.
it_user222807 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at Testing QA Solutions Ltd (TQS)
Consultant
Useful to see how the build is progressing and how many tests are left to pass.

What is most valuable?

  • It's a very useful, intuitive tool to continuously deploy new builds
  • A clean user interface
  • It's very easy to use, even for non-build engineers
  • Ability to run automated tests as part of the build process
  • Easy to pinpoint issues with the detailed logs
  • Easy navigation
  • Useful to see how the build is progressing and how many tests are left to pass before the build is green

How has it helped my organization?

  • Improved the quality of builds by running unit tests as part of every build
  • Reduced the risks of regression defects by running automated tests as part of the build process

What needs improvement?

The UI could be more structured, as it is so customisable it is quite easy to get lost around the screens.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used this product for over six months now.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

Only environment issues which caused failed deployments. Also, if people were connected to the database on the backend, the build would fail.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It seemed a very stable tool with hardly any downtime in the six months I was using it.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Not at all. In fact it was so stable we were able to add and create our own virtual environments each time we needed to deploy. This meant that each user had their own virtual environment, meaning nothing ever got overwritten.

How are customer service and technical support?

I had no need for it as we had DevOps engineers who fixed any issues.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I used to use Jenkins in a previous job. I started using TeamCity when I changed jobs as that was the tool that was being used, but I preferred TeamCity to Jenkins.

How was the initial setup?

It's fairly straightforward.

What about the implementation team?

It was implemented by an in-house team.

What was our ROI?

We used to deploy multiple times a day too many different environments. Also, we had offices in Australia who were using it when we were asleep! Effectively we were using this tool 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

What other advice do I have?

Do it! Very easy to use and very stable. A must have tool for any teams using agile methodologies.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
reviewer1686387 - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner at a computer software company with 11-50 employees
Real User
The GUI is nice
Pros and Cons
  • "TeamCity's GUI is nice."
  • "We've called TeamCity tech support. Unfortunately, all their tech support is based in Europe, so we end up with such a big time crunch that I now need to have one person in the US."

What is our primary use case?

We generally use TeamCity for automation and development.

What is most valuable?

TeamCity's GUI is nice.

What needs improvement?

One thing comes to mind, but maybe it's more of an issue on our side and not a problem with TeamCity itself. We don't have the high availability package. So I'd like our company to purchase that. So when one goes down, then we have a backup. I think we've purchased it, but we just haven't had anyone with the time to implement it. I think there was an extra cost, but we did buy it, and then I think you have to set it up in a certain way.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using TeamCity for about three years. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's easy to scale, but this is on RDS, so you can scale it up and down. I don't think we purchased the scaling features, but they do have scalability. All of our developers are using it, so more than a hundred.

How are customer service and support?

We've called TeamCity tech support. Unfortunately, all their tech support is based in Europe, so we end up with such a big time crunch that I now need to have one person in the US. Still, the tech support is pretty good. Even the original person that wrote the product is still working there, so that's good. But we have issues with the time zone.

How was the initial setup?

It can be pretty complex. There's the RDS setup, where you use RDS, and you have agents and whatnot. I wouldn't say it's super complex. At the same time, it's not something where you just click a button, and you're done. It's kind of in the middle range. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

TeamCity is on the expensive side. It's more for developers than CIS admins. Conversely, Ansible is more for CIS admins and less for developers. It would be nice to have a solution that works for both purposes. So I think Ansible was something they were thinking about purchasing, but I'm not sure if that ever occurred.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

There are two teams — on-prem and cloud — and the cloud team uses TeamCity. On-prem uses SUSE automation.

What other advice do I have?

I rate TeamCity eight out of 10.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
it_user218967 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Product Manager with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Allowed us to create a visual flow of the processes and steps involved in moving a build through its phases.

Valuable Features

The ability to create Build Pipelines and create user groups are the two most valuable features.

Improvements to My Organization

  • As a business we had a custom build process where the only people with access to the build were our build engineers.
  • Teamcity allowed us to create a visual flow of the processes and steps involved in moving a build through its phases.
  • The product also allowed us to identify areas for improvement in our process.

Room for Improvement

This product lacks real reporting for all the information it captures; we should be able to create reports or dashboards for management.

The product captures a lot of information about build processes, but there is no easy way to create/generate reports that can be used by management.

Use of Solution

We have been using TeamCity for about 6 – 7 years.

Deployment Issues

There were no issues with deployment.

Stability Issues

There were no issues with stability.

Scalability Issues

It would be ideal if agents could scale up on demand using a private cloud. The functionality is there for Amazon.

Customer Service and Technical Support

Customer Service:

Good.

Technical Support:

Excellent.

Initial Setup

The setup is extremely straightforward.

Implementation Team

In-house implementation.

Other Solutions Considered

We evaluated a few other products. The only product that had was a real contender was Electric Commander.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Systems Administrator at Facebook
Real User
I generally find TeamCity a lot more intuitive than Jenkins.

Moving to TeamCity from Jenkins

At work, we’re slowly migrating from Jenkins to TeamCity in the hope of ending some of our recurring problems with continuous integration. My use of Jenkins prior to this job has been almost strictly on a personal basis, although I pretty much only use Travis nowadays.

The biggest difference upon initial inspection is that TeamCity is far more focused on validating individual commits rather than certain types of tests. Jenkins’ front page presents information that is simply not useful in a non-linear development environment, where people are often working in vastly different directions. How many of the previous tests passed/failed is not really salient information in this kind of situation.

Running specific tests for individual commits on TeamCity is far more trivial in terms of interface complexity than Jenkins. TeamCity just involves clicking the ”…” button in the corner on any test type (although I wish it wasn’t so easy to click “Run” by accident).

I generally find TeamCity a lot more intuitive than Jenkins out of the box. There’s a point at which you feel that if you have to scour the documentation to do anything remotely complex in an application, you’re dealing with a bad interface.

One disappointing thing in both is that inter-branch merges improperly trigger e-mails to unrelated committers. I suppose it is fairly difficult to determine who to notify about failure in situations like these, though. It seems like TeamCity pulls up the first parent of the merge commit and sends the e-mail to them, when in reality it’s usually the merge author that should be getting that information. Maybe I’m just ignorant of where to find a setting to change that behaviour.

Being able to jump the queue is useful when releasing. It requires a plugin to do in a sane way in Jenkins, unless you’re willing to kick everyone else out of the queue. TeamCity can do it by default, and it’s obvious how to do so when scheduling the tests.

There are supposedly more advanced features in Jenkins that don’t exist in TeamCity (yet), but I don’t think we use them.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user241605 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user241605Build & DevOps Engineer; QA Automation at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Vendor

As usual, the answer is that there is a plugin to solve the problem: "Jenkins’ front page presents information that is simply not useful in a non-linear development environment"

Custom views allows a logged in user to see only the jobs they want to see.

Edit: and the custom views can be hard coded lists of jobs, or can be regular expressions that parse job names / labels, etc. Very flexible and very useful for large jenkins systems.

it_user289653 - PeerSpot reviewer
Release and deployment process manager at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Vendor
There are the occasional issues in deploying software, but it has centralized our build automation.

What is most valuable?

  • Centralized build automation
  • Ability to embed powershell scripts for automated deployments
  • Auditability of builds
  • Unit tests
  • Smoke tests
  • Automated deployments

How has it helped my organization?

Continuous integration has reduced build failures and highlighted issues sooner. Automated deployments of web services, database scripts and applications chained across all environments has minimized time and effort, sped up delivery time, reduced risk of human error and enabled automated communication to stakeholders via integration with JIRA for release notes.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used it for three years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

Occasionally issues deploying software using the tool due to configuration issues within the tool (mostly around powershell configuration).

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We had to add additional servers to enable a failover capability, but this was more to do with our infrastructure

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No issues enquired.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

I've not required customer service.

Technical Support:

It's good. It's done via online forums.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We previously used Jenkins and Cruise control. We changed to enable one common solution and standard support model, also better functionality.

How was the initial setup?

It was very simple. I have also installed on my home server to enable me to continue to develop and learn the tool.

What about the implementation team?

We did it in-house.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The initial cost was only the cost of a virtual server, and database which was less than 1000 Euros a month. I am not aware of ongoing costs.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

No other options were evaluated.

What other advice do I have?

Make sure you define the standards and naming conventions prior to implementing TeamCity.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user326337 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user326337Customer Success Manager at PeerSpot
Consultant

Debra, how do you find your build automation 10 months later? Have you seen significant progress?

it_user283431 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Developer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
It provides us with continuous deployment and integration, but get someone who knows it well to go through the basics.

What is most valuable?

  • General ease of use
  • Quick start up time
  • NUnit build runner

How has it helped my organization?

  • Continuous deployment
  • Continuous integration
  • Testing feedback

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used it for four years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No issues encountered.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No issues encountered.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No issues encountered.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

There was no previous solution in place.

How was the initial setup?

It's straightforward as the UI is intuitive.

What about the implementation team?

I implemented it myself.

What was our ROI?

It's free, so very good.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Start with the free version, and go from there.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

No other options were evaluated.

What other advice do I have?

Get someone who knows it well to go through the basics, but there's also loads of help on Google.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user