@edowling great question! I hope we're also virtually flawless ;)
Seriously speaking, Greenhouse, buddybuild, Bitrise and a couple of others have built the same core set of capabilities - all of us can build, test and distribute your iOS and Android apps. The differences are in the details and focus areas.
buddybuild seems to focus more on the feedback side - they are building their own crash reporting, analytics etc. We focus on the core CI experience by supporting lots of different testing frameworks, beta distribution option, cross platform frameworks etc and integrate and partner with various different 3rd party services that app developers might use.
I hope somebody will chime in who has tried us and a couple of our competitors and can give an unbiased comparison from a end users perspective.
@tauno@edowling Chiming in as the founder of buddybuild to offer a slightly different perspective on how buddybuild compares.
At a high level, buddybuild ties together continuous integration, continuous delivery and user feedback into a single solution.
First, our customers have told us that the buddybuild CI is the easiest to setup, the most reliable, feature rich and consistently offers 2-3x faster build times than other companies in the space.
(A quick overview of just SOME features:, support for Bitbucket, GitHub and many other source repositories, on-device testing, nearly every testing frameworks you might use, support for iOS / Android / React Native / Cordova / Ionic platform, built-in integrations like Slack, Hipchat, JIRA and many others)
Second, the buddybuild deployment service makes it trivial to deploy your app to any of the TestFlight/AppStore/PlayStore. In addition, almost every single iOS developer that has used the buddybuild deployment system has found it to be 'magical'. Buddybuild can auto provision new testers on your behalf in seconds. It deals with the headaches associated with managing and provisioning device UDIDs. A tester gets an email to install a build, and if they’re not in the provisioning profile, buddybuild adds them in on your behalf, regenerates the build on-the-fly, ready for them to download a few seconds later.
To Tauno's point - we also care a lot about incorporating a beta tester's feedback. We believe that a single solution that ties together CI/CD crash reporting and user feedback in a comprehensive platform helps teams build apps that their customers love.
To that end, we offer a simple SDK that makes it easy for a tester to take a simple screenshot, and send their feedback along with important diagnostic details back to a development team.
The buddybuild SDK also includes a crash reporting solution which records crashes, frequency, and affected users - but also shows highlights the exact lines of source code that caused the crash in the first place (we call that "source context").
Last week, we also launched "Instant Replay". A feature which allows you to go back in time and watch a video of the actions a user took within your app right up to the moment of the crash. Instant Replay works in conjunction with source context to offer you both the exact lines of code that caused a crash as well as the exact sequence of events that lead up to it.
If you want try a demo and see some of these features in action for yourself you can try our demo: http:///www.buddybuild.com/demo
Finally, I can't see a scenario where my perspective is unbiased :) Checkout what other people are saying on twitter: http://www.twitter.com/buddybuild
Thanks for chiming in and giving your pitch, @dennispilarinos ! I've been always curious about what buddybuild actually sees as their differentiator compared to us.
We seem to be on the same mission - to help developers ship higher quality apps. And competition like this is really good for end users! :)
The differences are in the implementation details. The biggest difference as I see it is that buddybuild is rolling their own in-house solution for crash reporting, app updates, bug reporting etc while Greenhouse integrates with leading 3rd party services in most of these areas (stay tuned for some announcements regarding this! :)).
As for user feedback - generally speaking Greenhouse is outperforming other major players in the mobile CI space in terms of setup speed and convenience (takes under a minute to get your first build going), integrations, build speed, SDK and platform updates, reliability, user experience etc. At least according to the feedback we receive daily from our ever growing user-base. We're working hard on all these areas and have quite many features in the pipeline that will improve the areas where we're behind some competitors.
Then again, listening to the praise of the founders of said services isn't that valuable :) I suggest you try out the different services in this space (Greenhouse and buddybuild aren't definitely the only ones here) and find the one that works best for your specific use-case and gives you the most value for your money. I'm confident that Greenhouse is the perfect choice for a huge amount of companies but for some the solution is something totally different (need lots of custom features - look at Jenkins!).
Setting up 📟 continuous integration is already quite complicated but when it comes to setting up a smooth build chain and CI for 📱 mobile platforms it gets really difficult. So happy to see there is some movement in this space now.
Splittable
Greenhouse
Unblocked
Greenhouse
Simplecast
Fleksy Developer Platform
Greenhouse
Waffle
Greenhouse