AppVeyor vs Buildkite

AppVeyor provides continuous integration tools for Windows developers, with hosted service, self-hosted jobs and an Enterprise installation option for customer premises. A build pipeline can retrieve code, restore caches, install dependencies, build and test software, package artifacts, deploy, then run finalizer scripts. Projects can be configured through an appveyor.yml file or the user interface. Build matrices can create jobs across operating systems, variables, platforms, configurations, test categories and build clouds. Listed source control providers include GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab, Azure DevOps, Kiln and Gitea. Deployment options include inline providers and environments triggered manually or through the API. The REST API covers teams, projects, builds, environments and deployments, with bearer-token authentication. Secure variables can be encrypted with account-specific keys and are not decoded during pull-request builds by default. Hosted builds use pristine virtual machines not shared with other builds, and VM state is not preserved. Every plan has a 60-minute maximum build-job execution time. Paid plans start at $29 a month.

Buildkite Pipelines is a CI/CD platform that dispatches pipeline steps as jobs to agents. Agents can be hosted by Buildkite or run in a customer's own infrastructure, including on-premises and cloud environments. Dynamic pipelines can generate and upload steps during a build, allowing a workflow to respond to code changes, test results or runtime logic. Test Engine collects results across testing frameworks and provides tools to track, analyze and act on them. It can detect and quarantine flaky tests, split tests across parallel jobs, and monitor test performance, reliability and ownership. Documented integrations include Slack, PagerDuty, Datadog, Honeycomb, OpenTelemetry, Amazon EventBridge, Artifactory, Docker Hub and Backstage. Buildkite lists TLS 1.2+ for data in transit and AES-256 encryption at rest, along with an annually audited SOC 2 Type II report. The Free Plan costs nothing and allows up to 5 users and 10 concurrent jobs. Pro costs $30 a month, billed per active user monthly, and includes up to 50 users and up to 250 concurrent agents, with 10 included.