Open Source CircleCI Alternatives

Harness Open Source puts source code hosting, automated pipelines, developer environments and artifact registries behind a single service you run yourself. The stack that normally needs a Git host, a CI provider and a registry vendor collapses into one container on one port.

It is the successor to Drone. Where Drone covered continuous integration alone, Harness adds repositories, Gitspaces and registries, and the Drone codebase stays available as a feature branch while pipeline parity is worked toward. The server is written in Go with a Node-built web interface, and pipelines execute inside Docker containers.

One docker run command brings the platform up on port 3000, and with it these pieces.

• Code hosting: repositories served by the same binary that serves the user interface.
• Pipelines: DevOps automation running in Docker, negotiating the API version with your daemon.
• Gitspaces: hosted development environments provisioned from inside the platform.
• Artifact registries: package storage with conformance tests included in the build targets.
• REST API: a generated swagger specification is served alongside the app, with personal access tokens issued from the CLI.

Mount a volume before you start, because the container holds both the database and the repositories and loses everything otherwise. Docker Desktop, Rancher Desktop, Colima and native Linux Docker all work, the middle two needing a socket symlink or an environment variable. Building from source needs Go 1.20 or higher, Node and protobuf.

Woodpecker keeps a CI/CD engine small without giving up extensibility. It suits a team that wants pipelines on its own hardware rather than a hosted build service billed by the minute, and it does not demand a database cluster before the first job runs.

The engine splits into a server and agents. SQLite is the default database, so there is nothing extra to provision, and at idle the server needs around 100 MB of memory while an agent needs about 30 MB. That footprint fits comfortably on a single modest machine.

A few things shape how Woodpecker is adopted and extended.

• Several install paths: are documented in the administration guide, so the engine fits containers or a plain server.
• Plugins: extend pipelines, and a plugin overview site collects both core team and community entries.
• Codeberg: runs Woodpecker as its main CI/CD engine, a public instance operating at real scale.
• Translations: are managed on the project's self-hosted Weblate instance, with a public overview of language coverage.
• Apache 2.0: covers the source, with per-file headers naming the license and copyright that apply, while the docs directory carries a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Documentation for installation, administration and pipeline configuration lives on the project site. Funding comes from backers on Open Collective and GitHub Sponsors rather than a paid tier, which is worth knowing when you weigh how the project will be maintained over time.

Built to help product teams ship software faster, with quality and security, Semaphore is a CI/CD platform that runs on infrastructure you control rather than metered minutes you rent. The Community Edition in this repository is everything outside the enterprise directory, and installing it takes ten to thirty minutes.

Pipelines are configured in YAML with parallel execution, and the platform is built for containers, Kubernetes, and multi-cloud environments. The project publishes separate installation guides for a single Ubuntu machine, for Kubernetes, and for a local Minikube setup used during development. It scales from a solo developer to a large engineering team without a change of tool.

What you get spans the runtime, the install path, and how the project itself is run.

• YAML configuration: declarative pipelines with parallel execution and container support.
• Install routes: guides for a single Ubuntu machine, a Kubernetes cluster, and local Minikube.
• Three editions: the Apache 2.0 Community Edition, a commercially licensed Enterprise Edition, and the hosted Semaphore Cloud.
• Open governance: RFCs, Special Interest Groups, and a written governance document decide what gets built.
• Public planning: a roadmap and a Kanban project board show what is coming, and development meetings are published.

The project is candid that its documentation and processes are still evolving as it opens up, pointing contributors at the contributing guide, the release process, the developer guidelines, and the local development notes. It suits teams who want their CI on their own hardware, and organizations that need enterprise support without giving up the ability to read the source.