Why productive (mobile) developers choose Bitrise for CI/CD

localazy · November 19, 2021, 8:10am

In this article, we will tell you why we think Bitrise is the platform to choose as a mobile developer looking for the best CI/CD solution and how Localazy fits in.

⚖️ Bitrise is better than Jenkins; here's why

There are several areas where Bitrise will outperform Jenkins and other similar self-managed CI solutions. Migrating your app from Jenkins to Bitrise will shift the responsibility from your team to the Bitrise platform, helping you increase:

Productivity: On Bitrise, there is no need for dedicated engineers to install dependencies, troubleshoot issues, maintain the CI or the hardware.
Consistency: Treating CI configuration as code makes it easy to manage and share across the mobile teams. Customer secrets and all their sensitive information are stored in an encrypted database.
Efficiency: Bitrise helps you eliminate redundancy and reduce risk by handling everything on virtual machines — there is no need to manage user permissions across multiple tools and platforms.

⚙️ Setting up

Bitrise treats repositories as projects (whether it's native or cross-platform). Since Bitrise is a fully managed platform as a service, there's no need to waste time setting up the infrastructure. Setup, administration, and configuration are quick and straightforward.

On the other hand, Jenkins CI, plugins, and any additional functionality need to be set up and maintained manually. Plugins and best practices are not coherent syntactically and methodically.

With Bitrise, your configs are available as .yml files, and you can edit them in the GUI with simple drag and drop. On top of that, Bitrise offers over 300 integrations with all the popular tools out of the box - including Localazy!

🔧 Maintenance

Bitrise supports all types of native and cross-platform projects, unlike Jenkins, which requires engineers to maintain machines and individual plugins. Bitrise also allows you to choose any version of Xcode you want, with new releases being fully supported within 48 hours. You can always switch from one tech stack version to another with one click (such as from macOS Catalina to BigSur).

With Bitrise, you can also choose when to upgrade or downgrade the versions of Steps/Integrations and stack versions with a couple of clicks. When using Jenkins, you can't roll back once you upgrade something.

🚀 Performance

Bitrise offers different plans for specific needs. When using Jenkins, the performance is dependent on the efficiency of plugins, which need to be tweaked manually to achieve optimal results and hardware that needs to be replaced to meet performance and security requirements.

🔐 Security & Permissions

Bitrise gives you the option to assign the following roles for each of your applications: owners, admins, developers, and testers/QA. Each role comes with different levels of permissions. With Jenkins, all users are given full access by default, and permissions need to be set up manually by Jenkins Administrator.

Bitrise also features several secure authentication methods, such as SAML SSO, GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket SSO, two-factor authentication, and complex password requirements. Unlike Jenkins, with its single-layer of security surrounding the CI fleet and varying levels of protection for OSS plugins. Of course, you can add additional security manually.

See the full comparison chart of Bitrise vs. Jenkins on the Bitrise.io website.

📰 Migrating your mobile CI from Jenkins

73.9% of the surveyed enjoyed their work more after migrating away from Jenkins
A whopping 89.8% saw a performance increase after moving to a new CI tool
Almost 60% of practitioners felt that their experience with Jenkins had a positive impact on understanding cloud CI

Read the full report here

💬 Hear it from people who made the switch

We have picked two of the many Bitrise customer stories to show you why they made the switch and what benefits did introducing Bitrise bring to their workflow.

⚫ November Five

November Five is a Belgian digital transformation agency with 75+ employees and an impressive list of clients, including global brands like Spotify and Coca-Cola. When it comes to mobile development, November Five builds both React Native and native Android and iOS apps (and the company also creates web applications).

November Five Homepage

November Five has a large client base, so it needed a robust solution to manage the complexities of the growing number of codebases. In the past, they had used a locally hosted Jenkins server for CI, but the solution proved to be less than optimal. Considering the time and resources needed to ensure that Jenkins was stable and working correctly, the team realized that their way of working was no longer sustainable for a fast-scaling company.

While exploring and comparing the various CI offerings on the market, Bitrise came out the winner – auto-updating stacks and the ability to switch easily between them was a big draw. Getting started with Bitrise was intuitive and straightforward, and the team had it up and running in record time. Because Bitrise's Step library included everything they needed, they could get to work in minutes. Now, the team has around 200 different apps and app variants — all built on Bitrise.

"We can sum up Bitrise's impact on our mobile development processes in three words: productivity, quality, and security. For us, it's more than just an ultimate time-saver" — Thomas Van Sundert, CTO & Co-founder

Read more about November Five & Bitrise

🟦 Buffer

If you haven't heard about Buffer, it's a social media management platform that offers publishing, engagement, and analytics services on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. With 80 employees working from six different time zones, managing everything can be a little tricky.

Buffer Homepage

When engineers at Buffer tried to use Jenkins, complexity was the main dealbreaker. Not being able to jump in and customize the solution resulted in problems such as dependency changes breaking their workflow setup, more challenging learning curves for new team members, and trivial issues that just made life harder for everyone.

After a while, Buffer took the first steps towards Bitrise. The results were apparent right away:

The third-party security plugins that didn't work with other CI ran flawlessly.
The customizability was exceptional.
The platform was crafted in a clean and user-friendly manner.

The result is a seamless, continuous shipment of updates that helps eliminate human error from the release process. In other words, they're able to concentrate on what matters while having a more smooth development lifecycle — an achievement Bitrise hopes to bring to many more developers in the future.

"Bitrise's workflow pattern has allowed us to become incredibly productive" — Joe Birch, Android Lead

Read more about Buffer & Bitrise

📓 Read more success stories

You can read all of the success stories on the official Bitrise website.

Or, you can add your own story by joining the Bitrise club!

🕹️ Bitrise Steps

Steps are the heart of Bitrise. A Step is a build task: for example, the Git Clone Step clones your Git repository at the start of a build, while the Google Play Deploy Step can deploy your finished app to the Play Store. A Step contains the code that performs the build task, and there are now over 300 steps available!

There are three types of steps on the platform:

Bitrise Steps are developed and maintained by the Bitrise team.
Verified Steps are official integrations developed and maintained by the service owner.
Community Steps are open source and custom steps offered by the Bitrise Community.

You can configure your Steps and tasks in the Workflow Editor to automate your CI/CD with Bitrise.

Localazy Verified Step

🚩 Localazy Verified Step

We are proud to be a Bitrise partner, and we are happy that you can find Localazy Verified Step on Bitrise. Use it to incorporate localization deployment into your Bitrise workflow. It's simple enough to remove the localization burden from your shoulders with Localazy and Bitrise. No more file handling. You can manage all the translations and build steps of your project in Localazy and Bitrise with beautiful UIs designed for developers.

Read our previous article on using the Localazy Verified step.

🦄 Create your own Step!

You can choose from already available Steps or even create your own. Steps are written in Go or Bash.

Read the official guide on creating your Bitrise Step.

If you would like to join the list of Verified Steps on Bitrise and become a partner, submit your Step for review.

Read more on how to become a Bitrise Partner with your own Verified Step

✔️ Conclusion

If you are looking for the best CI/CD platform, we recommend you give Bitrise a chance. You will most likely fall in love with it, and as a bonus, you can incorporate the Localazy Step into your workflow with zero hassle.

If you look to expand your support of integrations for your developer-oriented platform, definitely join the Bitrise Verified Steps family and become a partner! 💖

We want to thank Bitrise for their warm welcome, and we are looking forward to seeing more Localazy users using Bitrise as their platform of choice.