Semaphore Reviews

Documentation is great, ease of use is great, the support team are great. It is the kind of tool that you become so used to that you can't do without. The differences between offerings of CI/CD nowadays are not that big, so it's the details that count. This is where the good customer support, good documentation and simple to use interface come in really handy!

Most of the interface is great, but I'd love to have a slightly better overview of whats happening. It shows the most recent branches, and with quite a few projects it can be become quite overcrowded.

Every change we make, we get tested code, and without even flinching, it can deploy.

Semaphore has worked great as a build system for our engineering team over thousands and thousands of builds. Support team is very responsive and helpful, platform has been very reliable over the years, and their team frequently releases new features.

Would be great to have the ability to easily rerun a single job without having to rerun an entire workflow

CI/CD

- Easy to get set up

- Support is very responsive and helpful. They updated their documentation after I contacted them.

- Uptime is reliable

- Easy UX/UI for integrating new projects

- Documentation is pretty good

- Consistently adding new features

- I wish more people used it so that I could find more online articles/threads on how to solve issues I face. Thankfully, their support team is great so I just go to them whenever I have issues.

- Wish there was an active integration community with plugins similar to what github actions does with its github actions marketplace

It helps us ensure we ship code with minimal amount of bugs by allowing us to easily handle CI/CD

The CI service runs great. It's very reliable and visually appealing. Our tech team loves it!

Whenever I contact the Technical Support on the very rare occasions that I had an issue, they reply very fast and professionally. Compared to other big players in the market that take ages to answer a ticket, Semaphore is a game changer. However, is not just about speed, but the all agents I had the chance to interact with from their Technical Support are highly qualified in all technical aspects. In addition to that, whenver I non-technical questions, they think outside-the-box to find the most pragmatic and convenient solution, eg: while certifting for ISO 27001 they were very helpful.

I totally recommend working with them.

More flexibility on instante types for standard plans.

Great Continuous Integration pipeline. Easy to configure and track workflow progress status with a great UI.

I "own" some open source projects, particularly one (Codehaus Cargo) which covers quite a range of possibilities, and needs to work in a combination of environments. I am also a true believer that there should be maximum motivation and incentive for people to contribute to open source while ensuring quality: that project hence has over 2'500 tests, that can (and should) be run on different JDKs and of course on all supported (tens of) J2EE / Java EE / Jakarta EE containers. Though this setup is powerful, it would be unfair to ask contributors and developers to run it: one needs 5 different JDKs, and the whole test suite would take 6 to 7 hours to complete sequentially.

For such a setup, Semaphore is one of the key elements to success. More precisely:

- Semaphore supports a hosted configuration, which remains quite customizable and scalable, ensuring I can autonomously get all the contexts mentioned above covered in one place.

- The performance of the platform is quite good, enabling pull requests to get rapid feedback. Though it's not easy to tame at first, SemaphoreCI also has extremely powerful capabilities for (sub)build of dependencies and parallelisation - Substantially reducing the build and test time (once you get it right).

- With Semaphore 2, the whole configuration and management moved to scripted variants, which are version controlled and much easier to manage.

- Last but not least, the support team is responsive, understanding, kind and solution-oriented.

The move to Semaphore 2 is definitely good, as the Classic version was becoming overwhelmingly complex over time. I would wish there would have been an easier migration path, for example extracting (at least parts) of the Classic build configuration to the Semaphore 2 YAML definitions.

I "own" some open source projects, particularly one (Codehaus Cargo) which covers quite a range of possibilities, and needs to work in a combination of environments. I am also a true believer that there should be maximum motivation and incentive for people to contribute to open source while ensuring quality: that project hence has over 2'500 tests, that can (and should) be run on different JDKs and of course on all supported (tens of) J2EE / Java EE / Jakarta EE containers. Though this setup is powerful, it would be unfair to ask contributors and developers to run it: one needs 5 different JDKs, and the whole test suite would take 6 to 7 hours to complete sequentially.

For such a setup, Semaphore is one of the key elements to success.

The support is excellent. When I've needed help with something, it's always been easy to quickly get help from a human. I also enjoy the "SSH Debug" functionality a lot.

The community is small compared to e.g. GitHub Actions, so I have to write a larger part of my workflows myself instead of integrating something that someone else already made.

Standard CI stuff: Building, testing, linting, and pushing artifacts for our codebases.

Helped us reduce build times significantly.

loads of customization options.

The support team is great and resolved your issues in a promptly manner.

While we no longer use GitHub, which was the primary reason we transitioned away from Semaphore, we do recommend Semaphore for any users leveraging github.

The detailed logs and intuitive user interface in Semaphore made it easier for your team to identify and resolve issues in the CI/CD process. This streamlined troubleshooting process saved valuable time and minimized disruptions to development flow.

Dear Semaphore Team,

I am writing to express my heartfelt appreciation for the exceptional support I received from your team. From the prompt response to the resolution of my technical issue, the level of service I experienced was truly outstanding.

The support representative who assisted me displayed a deep understanding of the problem and provided clear instructions for resolving it. Their expertise and willingness to go above and beyond by offering additional suggestions to optimize my workflow were truly commendable. Throughout our correspondence, they exhibited patience, professionalism, and a friendly demeanor, addressing all my inquiries with concise and easily understandable explanations. The solutions provided were well-documented, accompanied by screenshots and examples, making implementation seamless.

I want to extend my sincere gratitude to the entire Semaphore team for their customer-centric approach and commitment to excellence. This support experience has solidified my trust in Semaphore as a reliable partner for my development needs. Thank you for delivering exceptional support, and I look forward to continuing our successful collaboration.

Best regards,

Salem Bawazeer

I have been dissatisfied with Semaphore due to significant delays in pipeline execution. The tool has exhibited sluggish performance, resulting in prolonged wait times and hindering the overall efficiency of my workflow. Improvements in the speed and responsiveness of the pipeline execution process would greatly enhance the user experience and productivity.

Semaphore is a powerful platform that addresses the challenges of continuous integration and automation testing, providing significant benefits for users like myself. By offering seamless integration with version control systems and allowing for efficient build and deployment processes, Semaphore streamlines the continuous integration workflow, eliminating the need for manual interventions and reducing the risk of errors. Additionally, Semaphore's automation testing capabilities enable the execution of automated tests in a scalable and parallelized manner, saving valuable time and resources. This not only ensures quicker feedback on code changes but also enhances the overall quality and reliability of software releases. The comprehensive solution provided by Semaphore empowers developers and teams to achieve faster and more reliable software delivery while maintaining a high level of confidence in the codebase.

The UI/UX is great, so intuitive and beautiful that it helps to make developers happier :) Support also always responds quickly and provides the best support for all changes.

What can be improved:

- Affordable pricing options for smaller teams or startup

- Enhanced documentation for advanced features like "Parameterized promotions"

Enabling developers by deploying code to AWS infrastructure and facilitating automated testing.

One of those tools that just works without thinking about it. Great parallelism, fast and reliable. We can deploy over 10 microservices to multiple global regions within minutes.

I am missing a yaml syntax checker, and maybe the possibility of more logic within the pipeline execution. A little bitter user role management would be welcome

Deploying code to AWS infrastructure, running automated tests.