[danpalmer]

> Travis is obsolete, and they did it to themselves.

This is sad, but the conclusion I have come to over the last 3-4 years as well. It was anybody's market 4 years ago, but through a sustained pace I think CircleCI have out-executed Travis consistently.

The thing I find interesting is that, looking at Semaphore CI who used to be far behind Travis, they are now biting at the heels of CircleCI with their 2.0 iteration. From what I understand they are not venture backed and are a smaller team, and yet their product is starting to look like a real competitor. To me this says that Travis just failed to execute well enough, rather than Circle having more money (although that helps).

[gingerlime]

Semaphore v1 has been great and very simple to use. Huge fan of those guys. Bootstrapped, extremely friendly, helpful and competent. We’ve been using them since 2012.

v2 definitely looks promising but they’re not sunsetting v1. Lots of respect for that as well.

Edit: at the risk of sounding like a fanboy (I guess I am), they also grandfathered us indefinitely on the same price plan we signed. Not many companies do that sadly.

[markoa]

Thanks for mentioning Semaphore, cofounder here. Yes, we’re 100% bootstrapped and in this for the long haul. It’s really all about execution. We built 2.0 in a timeframe in which we’d previously ship one or two features. Of course years of domain experience help, but everyone from Fred Brooks to DHH is right — adding more people won’t help build a better product faster.

[briandear]

I love Semaphore. I remember getting a handwritten personal note and an informal invitation to visit in Novi Sad a few years ago. While that doesn’t say anything about the “tech” it does show that they are real people that care deeply about users — even fairly insignificant ones like me. That it’s a bootstrapped company with a really great product made me happy as well.

[anonova]

I wouldn't mind trying out Semaphore for some open source projects. On the community open source page [1], from what I understand, you offer a free service, but the pricing page [2] says that it's not free yet?

[1]: https://semaphoreci.com/community/open-source

[2]: https://semaphoreci.com/pricing

[markoa]

If you don't mind logs and project pages not being publicly visible, you can start using the Semaphore 2.0 free tier with your open source project. If you run out of credits send a support request and we'll increase.

That community page is outdated and referring to Semaphore Classic (1.0) and 2.0 will be getting proper open source support soon.