Sid Sijbrandij and the team at GitLab compared GitLab CI with the three Jenkins variants. Here’s what they learned…

The many plugin combinations for Jenkins has made Legacy Jenkins hard to configure and brittle when updating. Cloudbees is introducing two new versions of Jenkins to remedy the problem: Cloud Native Jenkins will start from scratch, while Jenkins Evergreen will focus on a set of essential plugins. GitLab CI adds new functionality in the main code base, avoiding the need for needless configuration and ensuring everything still works when updating.

Also to note — according to a recent Forrester report GitLab CI and Jenkins/Cloudbees are two of the four leading products for CI.