Buildbot vs Drone.io: What are the differences?

Buildbot: Python-based continuous integration testing framework. BuildBot is a system to automate the compile/test cycle required by most software projects to validate code changes. By automatically rebuilding and testing the tree each time something has changed, build problems are pinpointed quickly, before other developers are inconvenienced by the failure; Drone.io: Open source continuous integration platform built on Docker. Drone is a hosted continuous integration service. It enables you to conveniently set up projects to automatically build, test, and deploy as you make changes to your code Drone integrates seamlessly with Github, Bitbucket and Google Code as well as third party services such as Heroku, Dotcloud, Google AppEngine and more..

Buildbot and Drone.io can be primarily classified as "Continuous Integration" tools.

Some of the features offered by Buildbot are:

• run builds on a variety of slave platforms
• arbitrary build process: handles projects using C, Python, whatever
• minimal host requirements: Python and Twisted

On the other hand, Drone.io provides the following key features:

• Free for open-source
• GitHub, BitBucket integration
• Browser testing

"Highly configurable builds" is the primary reason why developers consider Buildbot over the competitors, whereas "Open source" was stated as the key factor in picking Drone.io.

Buildbot is an open source tool with 4K GitHub stars and 1.37K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Buildbot's open source repository on GitHub.

Packet, Geocodio, and Clay.io are some of the popular companies that use Drone.io, whereas Buildbot is used by Mozilla, Animoto, and Fetch Robotics. Drone.io has a broader approval, being mentioned in 47 company stacks & 20 developers stacks; compared to Buildbot, which is listed in 7 company stacks and 6 developer stacks.