Top 5 Modern CI/CD Tools in 2025

In the ever-growing ecosystem of infrastructure and software development, where tools like Kubernetes introduce complexity and hyperscalers welcome sprawl, it's more important to have your SDLC buttoned up and as efficient as possible. CI/CD, one of Cycle's noble sidekicks, is important in kicking off the SDLC, and having a tool that gets the job done without introducing extra complexity or constraint is paramount.

When speaking to companies, one of the largest software initiatives, aside from, 'we need a Kubernetes alternative', that we hear - has been, 'we need to update CI/CD' or 'Our integration process is manual, our approval process is manual, everything is manual and updates cause downtime'.

It's important to us as a modern DevOps tool to help make sure our customers are in the best position possible when adopting Cycle, which includes the automation of the DevOps lifecycle, which usually starts with CI/CD.

What is CI/CD?

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment is a DevOps practice that helps to automate the process of build, test and deploying code. Most CI/CD tools were created to speed up this sometimes very manual process. Some of the earliest CI/CD practices start with tools Jenkins, an open source tool, still used today, that ignited CI adoption around 2000.

CI/CD continued to gain steam in the mid 2000's-2010s, with the introduction of modern tools that require less manual set up and maintenance. You'd be hard pressed to find a DevOps team today without some semblance of a CI/CD process.

Here at Cycle, we pick up around the deployment part of CI/CD. Once you build and test your code and validate its ready for deployment, Cycle can pick up the code from your repository or CI tool.

Top 5 CI/CD Tools

1. Github Actions

GitHub Actions is by far the most common CI tool that we see teams here at Cycle using. GitHub has a track record of serving enterprise and SMB teams of various stages in development. Being native to GitHub source control provides tight coupling to a user's repository making it a relatively easy tool to get started with. Due to the large community and the ease of integration, it makes Actions a good first choice for anyone running small or large workloads. However, those outside of the GitHub ecosystem may not be a great fit for obvious reasons.

Key features:

• Hosted Runners
• Matrix builds
• Live Logs
• Secret Store
• Multi Container Testing

The integration with GitHub Actions and Cycle is seamless, making it easy to deploy to bare metal or cloud infrastructure, without the need for Helm, Kubernetes or YAML.

Our team has made an official Github Action to make the integration much easier. This GitHub Action allows you to trigger a pipeline on Cycle, pass variables, and track the execution step-by-step with detailed logging.

2. GitLab

GitLab is another popular choice among the Cycle community, a CI/CD tool focused on creating an AI driven comprehensive DevSecOps experience. With an emphasis on enterprise security, GitLab, a staple in the CI space, partners with companies looking for a secure all in one experience

They too are tightly coupled with their source code management making the build test deploy experience relatively seamless.

Key features:

• Integration with Code Repository
• Issue Tracking
• Security Scanning
• Automatic Deployments

Integration with GitLab and Cycle takes just a few steps:

1. GitLab Runner builds and tests your code
2. Pushes your Docker image to a registry (e.g., GHCR, Docker Hub)
3. Call Cycle's API or trigger a Cycle Pipeline via a Webhook that deploys to a Cycle environment

Cycle handles the infrastructure, networking, service orchestration, and deployments behind the scenes.

3. CircleCI

CircleCI is focused on making the CI/CD process easy for everyone and incredibly quick. The tool is highly configurable and comes with their own pre configured integrations, packages of YAML, called orbs for easy connectivity. CircleCI is focused on speed of delivery and developer experience making it a good choice for fast moving companies with a wide range of use cases.

Key features:

• Orbs
• Concurrency and Parallelism
• Runners
• SSH
• Source control agnostic

Using Cycle's API or Pipelines, we see many workflows using CircleCI.

4. Team City

Robust tool developed by the team at JetBrains, focused on developer productivity and deep integration into Jetbrains IDE like IntelliJ. Team City sets out to focus on more complex, enterprise level concerns and is often chosen over simpler CI tools when companies have legacy code bases, tight security, or advanced pipeline needs.

Key features:

• Smart build triggers
• Build optimization
• IDE integration
• Powerful RBAC

5. Buildkite

Buildkite lets you run build and deployment pipelines on your own infrastructure while using Buildkite's cloud-based UI and orchestration layer. Buildkite's position in the market is more niche with its focus on hybrid infrastructure, but still cater to the company that needs a robust, scalable CI/CD platform with the ease of running on self hosted infrastructure or in the cloud.

Key features:

• Hybrid CI/CD
• Scalable agents
• Observability
• Flexible Pipelines

Buildkite makes a great pairing for teams focused on edge or on prem deployments given Cycle's recent addition of Virtual Provider (bare metal integration).

Wrapping Up

There's a plethora of CI/CD tools available to the market today, some with more maintenance, some with less, some are faster or claim to be more user friendly. The important thing here, no matter the vendor you go with, is to make sure the tool fits your team's goals. We see it all of the time with K8s, since it's well known it must work well for us, but this couldn't be further from the truth in most cases.

CI/CD gives teams to automate and test the initial part of your DevOps lifecycle, which is very important when it comes to developer experience. Introduce friction from the gate and you'll have unhappy developers. Pair an awesome CI tool with Cycle and the whole process from build to deploy is seamless and friction free. Choose wisely!

💡 Interested in trying the Cycle platform? Create your account today! Want to drop in and have a chat with the Cycle team? We'd love to have you join our public Cycle Slack community!