This article is based on reporting originally published by TechTarget (June 2017). Practitioner and analyst quotes are sourced from that reporting.
The Case for Looking Beyond Jenkins
Jenkins has long been the default choice for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) in DevOps shops. Its plugin ecosystem is vast, its community is large, and it is battle-tested across thousands of production environments. Yet some enterprises have begun evaluating newer alternatives that promise a smoother developer experience, declarative pipeline syntax out of the box, and managed hosting options that reduce operational overhead.
Two tools drawing particular attention around mid-2017 were Shippable—a hosted CI/CD platform that added an on-premises option called Shippable Server—and Spinnaker 1.0, the open-source continuous delivery platform originally developed at Netflix and co-evolved with Google.
Shippable: Declarative Pipelines and Managed Hosting
What Makes Shippable Different
A key selling point for Shippable is its declarative pipeline model. Rather than writing imperative scripts to provision infrastructure, run tests, and trigger deployments, engineers declare the desired end state and Shippable handles the orchestration. This contrasts with traditional Jenkins job configuration, which has historically required significant scripting and plugin wiring.
Rommel Tinoco, a DevOps architect and consultant for Ozan.com (a fintech startup incubated by EFT Software in Turkey), described the appeal directly:
“I have plenty of experience with other CI/CD tools like Jenkins. Creating pipelines in those tools is not fun—you have to write a bunch of code. Once I declare what I want to do, [Shippable] goes in the background and does all the stuff I would otherwise have to do, such as creating scripts to provision resources.”
— Rommel Tinoco, DevOps Architect, Ozan.com / EFT Software
Tinoco also noted a practical support advantage: Shippable engineers were integrated into his team’s Slack channel and responded to support requests within minutes—an important factor for a team based outside major tech hubs.
Reducing Operational Overhead
Jeppe Frandsen, senior software architect at Bang & Olufsen (the Danish high-end audio and video company), highlighted a different but equally common Jenkins pain point: self-hosting burden.
“Jenkins was OK, but the drawback was I had to host, maintain and upgrade servers myself.”
— Jeppe Frandsen, Senior Software Architect, Bang & Olufsen
A managed SaaS CI/CD platform offloads server patching, scaling, and upgrades to the vendor—an increasingly attractive trade-off as engineering teams focus resources on product work rather than infrastructure maintenance.
Shippable’s Gaps at the Time
Practitioners also identified areas where Shippable needed improvement:
- Deep branching support: Tinoco noted the need for better handling of complex branching models, where build behavior differs by individual branch.
- Enterprise security features: Frandsen wanted role-based access control (RBAC) and granular security policies—initially available in Shippable Server—to be brought into the SaaS product as well.
A Competitive Market
Shippable was not the only Jenkins challenger. The CI/CD tool market included CircleCI, Travis CI, Concourse CI, and Atlassian’s DevOps suite, among others. Each offers different trade-offs around pricing, on-premises support, language ecosystems, and pipeline flexibility.
Jenkins 2.0 and Blue Ocean: The Incumbent Responds
Jenkins itself had not stood still. Jenkins 2.0 added native continuous delivery pipeline support, and the project introduced a declarative pipeline syntax to reduce the scripting burden that had pushed some users toward alternatives. The Blue Ocean UI project offered a modern, visual interface for pipeline visualization—a direct response to the UX criticism Jenkins had received.
Sam Ghods, co-founder and services architect at Box, represented the perspective of teams choosing to stay with Jenkins:
“We evaluated a bunch of other solutions and did not find something that makes it worth it to switch.”
— Sam Ghods, Co-founder and Services Architect, Box
Box planned to migrate to Jenkins 2.0 and adopt Blue Ocean, valuing both the CLI skills already embedded in its engineering team and the improved visual pipeline representation the new UI provided.
The switching-cost argument is real: teams with years of Jenkins institutional knowledge, custom plugins, and existing pipeline configurations face meaningful migration effort. For many organizations, incremental Jenkins improvement is a more pragmatic path than wholesale replacement.
Spinnaker 1.0: Netflix and Google Enter the CD Arena
What Is Spinnaker?
Spinnaker is an open-source continuous delivery platform originally built at Netflix and open-sourced in 2015. Its design philosophy focuses on multi-cloud deployment pipelines—the ability to deploy to AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Kubernetes, OpenStack, and other targets from a single, unified platform. Google joined the Spinnaker community in 2014, and version 1.0 also counted Microsoft, Oracle, Target, and Veritas among its contributors.
Version 1.0 introduced halyard, a new CLI tool designed to simplify Spinnaker’s notoriously complex installation and configuration process—a significant usability improvement over earlier releases.
Analyst Perspective: Promising but Narrow
Analyst commentary from the time was measured. Robert Stroud of Forrester Research described Spinnaker 1.0 as a minimum viable product for a constrained use case:
“The product is a [minimum viable product] for a limited use case and doesn’t support the majority of deployments that take place on premises. Nor does the tool fully address the building of complex pipelines, which is a major integration challenge.”
— Robert Stroud, Analyst, Forrester Research
Stroud also noted that integration with third-party approval workflows—such as ServiceNow—and decision trees driven by automated test results were not yet supported.
Kurt Marko, technology analyst at MarkoInsights, agreed that Spinnaker’s initial audience was narrow:
“[It’s] limited to the most sophisticated developers, mostly at companies building software products that are deployed on multiple [cloud service providers]. It’s not the sort of tool most enterprises will need or be ready for right away.”
— Kurt Marko, Technology Analyst, MarkoInsights
Practitioner Interest
Despite analyst caution, practitioners running multi-cloud environments expressed genuine interest. Thomas Davis, director of information security at ServiceMaster (a household services provider using multiple public clouds), said:
“This is absolutely something that we would consider. We are getting to a maturity point where retooling takes significant work, but we are always in a continuous learning and continuous improvement [mode].”
— Thomas Davis, Director of Information Security, ServiceMaster
Key Factors When Evaluating Jenkins Alternatives
The practitioner and analyst perspectives from this period highlight a consistent set of evaluation criteria that remain relevant when assessing any CI/CD platform:
- Pipeline authoring model: Declarative vs. scripted pipelines significantly affect onboarding time and long-term maintainability.
- Hosting and operational burden: Self-hosted tools give maximum control but require dedicated maintenance capacity. SaaS platforms shift that burden to the vendor.
- Multi-cloud and infrastructure support: Organizations deploying across multiple cloud providers need a platform that can model those deployment targets natively.
- Enterprise integration: RBAC, audit logging, ITSM workflow integration (e.g., ServiceNow), and approval gates are often non-negotiable in regulated industries.
- Switching costs: Existing institutional knowledge, custom tooling, and pipeline configurations represent real migration costs that must be weighed against the benefits of a new platform.
- Ecosystem and community health: Longevity, plugin availability, and community responsiveness all affect total cost of ownership over a multi-year horizon.
A Note on Tool Landscape Evolution
This article reflects the CI/CD tool landscape as it stood in mid-2017. The market has continued to evolve significantly since then. Jenkins remains widely deployed. Spinnaker has matured and is now a CNCF incubating project with broader enterprise adoption. Shippable was subsequently acquired. Newer entrants—including GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, Tekton, and Argo CD—have further expanded the options available to DevOps teams. Evaluating any of these tools should begin with current documentation and community activity rather than historical comparisons alone.