2025 BairesDev Developers' Choice Awards

Best Build Automation & CI/CD Tools
— Nominees

Good tooling keeps environments consistent and delivers fast feedback so problems surface early and rollbacks stay clean. Our engineers nominated the tools that keep pipelines reliable without pulling developers out of flow.

2025 BairesDev Developers' Choice Awards

Jenkins

Jenkins

Used by 11+ million developers globally to deliver safety-critical and business-critical applications. Jenkins’ plugin ecosystem allows integration with virtually any technology stack, making it adaptable for teams that need full pipeline control.

Key Feature

Shared libraries and pipeline template catalog allow enterprises to create standard pipelines with built-in security and compliance guardrails.

GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions

Native CI/CD integrated with GitHub's 100M+ developer platform, running 4M+ workflows daily. Workflow automation lives alongside code and pull requests, eliminating context-switching.

Key Feature

OIDC authentication with cloud providers eliminates long-lived secrets, enabling secure deployments without storing credentials in repos.

GitLab CI/CD

GitLab CI/CD

Integrated DevSecOps platform where pipelines sit alongside code repositories, security scanning, and deployments. Review Apps automatically deploy branches for testing, and Auto DevOps provides sensible defaults teams can customize.

Key Feature

Merge trains automatically sequence multiple merge requests to prevent integration conflicts, ensuring the main branch stays stable.

CircleCI

CircleCI

Cloud-native CI platform optimized for speed with intelligent caching, parallel execution, and support for Linux, Windows, macOS, and ARM builds. Teams can SSH directly into failed jobs for live debugging.

Key Feature

Orbs package reusable YAML configurations that teams can share across repositories, standardizing pipeline patterns.

Spacelift

Spacelift

Infrastructure-as-code delivery platform for Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, and Kubernetes with policy-as-code enforcement built into every run. Automatic drift detection monitors infrastructure state against Git and flags deviations.

Key Feature

Policies written in OPA Rego enforce security, compliance, and cost controls before infrastructure changes reach production.

Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps

Microsoft's managed CI/CD with Azure-native integration and enterprise-grade controls. Multi-stage pipelines support complex approval workflows and environment gates.

Key Feature

Environment approvals and checks create manual or automated gates before production deployments.

TeamCity

TeamCity

CI from JetBrains with clear build chains and rich build insights. Strong integration with IntelliJ-based IDEs provides in-editor build status and shortcuts to relevant logs.

Key Feature

Flaky test detection automatically identifies unreliable tests and provides statistical confidence data.

Argo CD

Argo CD

GitOps continuous delivery for Kubernetes that treats Git as the single source of truth. Continuously monitors live cluster state against desired configuration and syncs automatically or on approval.

Key Feature

Application health status automatically detects degraded deployments by monitoring Kubernetes resources, enabling automated rollback.

Travis CI

Travis CI

Hosted CI that popularized simple YAML pipelines for open source and small teams. Matrix builds run jobs across multiple language versions and environment combinations in parallel, making cross-platform testing straightforward.

Key Feature

Build matrix configuration tests multiple versions and configurations from a single definition, generating comprehensive compatibility coverage.

GoCD

GoCD

Open-source CD platform built for complex release workflows with multiple stages and dependencies. Value Stream Maps visualize the complete path from commit through testing and deployment.

Key Feature

Fan-in and fan-out dependency modeling ensures that stages wait for all upstream dependencies to complete successfully before proceeding.

Developers' Insights

“

GitLab CI/CD is simple but effective.”

Federico Schwarzbock

Federico Schwarzbock

Engineering Manager, BairesDev

14 years of experience

“

We mainly use Bitbucket to merge our code and share it for review.”

Kevin Krzyżok

Kevin Krzyżok

Data Analyst, BairesDev

10 years of experience

“

Jenkins is super stable, and SQL-only deployments take just 8 seconds.”

Federico Emiliani

Federico Emiliani

Tech Lead, BairesDev

17 years of experience

About our Voters.

4K+

Full-Time Engineers

2M+

Annual Applications

10+

Average Years of Experience

We’re a distributed team of over 4,000 full-time, senior-level developers. Every year, over 2 million applications are reviewed to identify the top engineering talent who join BairesDev.

This gives us unparalleled technical coverage and depth. Our teams span over 100 technologies, and we’ve used that expertise across 1,400+ projects since 2009.

For this award, votes in each category were cast by developers with direct, hands-on experience using these tools. These nominations came directly from senior practitioners building software at scale.

Badge & Media Zone

Recognized as a Nominee in the 2025<br/>BairesDev Developers' Choice Awards.

Recognized as a Nominee in the 2025
BairesDev Developers' Choice Awards.

See which tools made the cut

We'll announce winners soon. Follow @BairesDev or bookmark this page to see who makes the cut.

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