CircleCI
CircleCI is a CI/CD SaaS built by Circle Internet Services, Inc. (San Francisco; CEO Jim Rose; ~358 employees; private, $1.7B valuation, $352M raised total, last Series F $100M in 2021). Self-hosted CircleCI Server runs v4.10.0 (2026), on Nomad 1.11.3 job scheduler with MongoDB 7.0. Credits cost $0.0006 each ($15 per 25,000). Linux Docker resource classes: Small 5 credits/min, Medium 10, Large 20, XLarge 40, 2XLarge 80; macOS M4 Pro Medium 200, Large 400 credits/min (20-40x Linux rate). Free tier: 30,000 credits/mo, 5 users, 30x concurrency. Performance plan: $15/mo base + $15/user/mo, 80x concurrency, overage at $0.0006/credit. A 10-person team running ~20,000 Linux build-minutes/mo (Medium resource class) lands near $192/mo on Performance ($15 base + $75 for the 5 seats beyond the included 5 + $102 credit overage). Config schema has held at version 2.1 since 2019. G2 user rating: 4.4/5 (509 reviews). Current version/status: SaaS continuously deployed; self-hosted CircleCI Server v4.10.0 (2026). License: proprietary SaaS (self-hosted Server under commercial license). Pricing: Free: 30,000 credits/mo, 5 users, 30x concurrency; Performance: $15/mo base + $15/user/mo plus $15 per additional 25,000 credits (80x concurrency); Scale: custom annual billing, unlimited concurrency and GPU access. Maintained by Circle Internet Services, Inc. — private company, CEO Jim Rose, ~358 employe
Pick CircleCI when a 5-20 engineer team runs Docker-heavy build/test pipelines and needs Large/XLarge resource classes plus layer caching and test splitting to cut wall-clock time — the credit overhead pays for itself in developer-hours saved. Skip it for solo devs, OSS maintainers, or pre-revenue startups: GitHub Actions gives unlimited free minutes on public repos and simpler $0.008/min private billing, undercutting CircleCI's credit math until volume climbs. If your whole stack already lives in GitLab, GitLab CI's flat $0.01/min beats CircleCI's variable resource-class pricing too. Honest weakness, straight from G2 reviewers: credit burn from Docker layer caching and macOS runners is opaque, with no built-in warning before a team blows through its monthly allotment. Known weakness: Credit consumption from Docker layer caching and macOS runners is opaque — G2 reviewers report costs spiking unpredictably with no built-in warning before a team's monthly credits run out.
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