Driven by promises of agility, faster releases, and operational efficiency, organisations of all sizes have been adopting DevOps practices to replace slower, stage-gated delivery models. DevOps unifies software development and IT operations, with continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), and infrastructure automation at its core.
The tooling ecosystem is vast, and choosing the wrong tools wastes time and budget. This guide cuts through the noise by covering seven well-established DevOps tools — what each one does, why it matters, and when you might reach for an alternative. The list was originally compiled by CBR Online and has been independently expanded here for technical accuracy and clarity.
1. Jenkins
Jenkins is arguably the most widely recognised open-source automation server in the DevOps space. It serves as the entry point for continuous integration in a huge proportion of engineering teams, partly because it is free, highly extensible, and backed by an enormous plugin ecosystem.
Jenkins can operate as a straightforward CI server — triggering builds on every code commit — or as a full continuous delivery hub. The Pipeline plugin (and its declarative syntax) lets teams define an entire build, test, and deploy pipeline as code in a Jenkinsfile, stored alongside the application source. This treat-pipeline-as-code approach improves auditability and reproducibility.
Key capabilities
- Hundreds of community plugins covering source control, testing, notifications, and deployment targets
- Declarative and scripted Pipeline DSL (Groovy-based)
- Distributed build support via agent nodes
- Active open-source community and long track record
Alternatives to consider: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, CircleCI, or Gradle for build automation specifically.
2. GitHub
GitHub is the world’s largest host of source code and a central collaboration hub for open-source and private projects alike. It wraps Git — the distributed version control system — in a web interface and adds pull requests, code review workflows, issue tracking, project boards, and a growing set of DevOps-native features such as GitHub Actions for CI/CD.
For DevOps teams, GitHub’s value goes beyond storage. The pull-request model enforces peer review before merges, branch protection rules enforce quality gates, and the marketplace provides integrations with virtually every major CI, monitoring, and deployment tool.
Key capabilities
- Git-based version control with branch and merge strategies
- Pull request and code review workflows
- GitHub Actions for native CI/CD pipeline automation
- Dependency graph, security advisories, and Dependabot for supply-chain hygiene
- Large ecosystem of third-party integrations via the GitHub Marketplace
Alternatives to consider: GitLab (which bundles CI/CD, a container registry, and project management in a single platform), Bitbucket, or self-hosted Gitea.
3. gulp.js
gulp.js is a JavaScript task runner aimed primarily at front-end build pipelines. It uses Node.js streams to pass files through a sequence of transforms — minification, transpilation, image optimisation, CSS pre-processing — without writing intermediate files to disk, which keeps builds fast.
gulp favours code over configuration: tasks are defined in plain JavaScript rather than in a proprietary DSL, making them straightforward to read, version, and debug. Its plugin ecosystem (over 2,000 community plugins at the time of writing) covers the most common file-transformation needs.
Key capabilities
- Streaming build system — files pass through transforms in memory
- Composable tasks using JavaScript functions
- File-watching for automatic rebuild on change
- Large plugin library for common transforms (Babel, Sass, Terser, etc.)
Alternatives to consider: webpack, Vite, Parcel, or npm scripts for simpler pipelines.
4. Microsoft Azure DevOps (formerly Visual Studio Team Services)
Originally launched as Visual Studio Online and later rebranded as Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), Microsoft’s hosted DevOps platform is now called Azure DevOps. It bundles source control (Azure Repos), CI/CD pipelines (Azure Pipelines), agile project tracking (Azure Boards), artifact management (Azure Artifacts), and test planning into a single SaaS offering backed by the Azure cloud.
Azure DevOps suits organisations already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem — particularly those using Azure as their primary cloud — but its pipelines support builds targeting any cloud, operating system, or language. Teams migrating from on-premises Team Foundation Server (TFS) can move to Azure DevOps with relatively low friction.
Key capabilities
- End-to-end DevOps toolchain in one platform (repos, pipelines, boards, artifacts, test plans)
- YAML-based pipeline definitions stored in source control
- Flexible deployment targets: Azure, AWS, GCP, on-premises
- Tight integration with Visual Studio, VS Code, and GitHub
- Free tier for small teams; paid tiers scale by parallel jobs and users
Note: The pricing figures cited in the original 2018 article (in GBP) are outdated. Consult the current Azure DevOps pricing page for accurate figures, as the model has changed significantly since VSTS.
Alternatives to consider: GitHub Actions (now owned by Microsoft), GitLab CI/CD, or JetBrains TeamCity.
5. New Relic APM
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is a critical but often overlooked part of a DevOps toolchain. New Relic’s APM product provides deep visibility into application behaviour at runtime — tracking response times, throughput, error rates, and slow database queries down to individual lines of code via distributed tracing and transaction traces.
In a continuous delivery context, APM tools are essential for correlating deployments with performance changes. New Relic supports deployment markers so you can overlay release events on performance graphs and quickly identify whether a new release caused a regression.
Key capabilities
- Full-stack observability: application, infrastructure, browser, and mobile
- Distributed tracing across microservices
- Real-time alerting with configurable thresholds
- Deployment tracking for correlating releases to performance metrics
- Database query analysis and external service monitoring
Alternatives to consider: Datadog, Dynatrace, Elastic APM, Prometheus with Grafana, or PagerDuty for alerting and incident management.
6. Docker
Docker popularised Linux containers as a practical packaging and deployment mechanism when it launched in 2013. A Docker container bundles an application together with its runtime dependencies — libraries, configuration, environment variables — into a single portable image that runs consistently across development laptops, CI servers, and production hosts.
For DevOps pipelines, containers solve the classic "works on my machine" problem. Because the image is immutable and portable, the same artefact that passes tests in CI is the exact artefact deployed to production. Docker integrates with all major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and container orchestration platforms.
Key capabilities
- Standardised image format (OCI-compliant) for consistent builds
- Docker Compose for defining multi-container local development environments
- Docker Hub and compatible registries (ECR, GCR, ACR) for image distribution
- Works on Linux, macOS (via Docker Desktop), and Windows
- Integrates with Kubernetes, Amazon ECS, Azure Container Apps, and other orchestrators
Alternatives to consider: Podman (daemonless, rootless containers), containerd, or Buildah for image building without a Docker daemon.
7. Vagrant
Vagrant, created by HashiCorp, automates the creation and management of reproducible virtual machine environments. Engineers define the desired environment — operating system, installed packages, network configuration, shared folders — in a plain-text Vagrantfile, and Vagrant provisions matching VMs on demand using providers such as VirtualBox, VMware, or cloud APIs.
The primary DevOps value is environment parity: every developer on a team can spin up an identical VM that mirrors staging or production, eliminating configuration drift. Vagrant integrates with configuration management tools including Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and Salt for provisioning logic.
Key capabilities
- Declarative
Vagrantfileconfiguration checked into source control - Multi-machine environments for simulating distributed systems locally
- Provider plugins for VirtualBox, VMware, AWS, and others
- Built-in provisioner support for shell scripts, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and Salt
- Cross-platform: Mac, Linux, and Windows
Alternatives to consider: Docker Compose (for container-based local environments), Lima (lightweight VMs on macOS), or cloud-based developer environments such as GitHub Codespaces or Gitpod.
Choosing the Right Combination
No single tool covers the full DevOps lifecycle. A practical starting stack for a small-to-medium team might combine:
- Source control & collaboration: GitHub or GitLab
- CI/CD: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or Azure DevOps Pipelines
- Containerisation: Docker
- Local environment management: Docker Compose or Vagrant
- Observability: New Relic APM, Datadog, or the open-source Prometheus/Grafana stack
- Front-end build automation: gulp.js, webpack, or Vite
The best toolchain is the one your team will actually use consistently. Favour tools with strong community support, clear documentation, and integrations that fit your existing infrastructure before chasing the latest entrant in any category.
Originally based on a roundup published by CBR Online in January 2018. Updated and expanded for technical accuracy.