# CircleCI 18 Hacker News commenters recommended CircleCI and 17 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months. **Verdict:** Hosted CI/CD service that people recommend as mature and dependable, with SSH debugging and a free plan. Critics cite slow caching, charges tied to concurrent runs, and recurring outages. ## Why people recommend it - Mature, dependable, long-running product (7 comments): "A big effort and investment went into resolving those outage issues you're referring to. Results have been stellar for a while now." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47978095)) "There is a reason that f.e. CircleCI is doing fully focused CI/CD for 10+ years and is still going strong." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46294981)) "something dependable that gets the job done and helps you to focus on what really matters" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46986965)) - Debug with SSH feature (4 comments): ""Debug with SSH" feature is something I would have liked to have had many times in the past" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46971595)) "Debug with SSH(1) is still one of our (CircleCI) most loved and praised features." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46986991)) "I do remember liking the feature where you could enter the console of the CI job" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46909373)) - Easier and faster than alternatives (3 comments): "CircleCI is typically faster (and more consistent) than GH Actions" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46763501)) "they've all been such an improvement over Jenkins" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46301574)) "all of them were so easy in comparison" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46299590)) ## What people warn about - Slow, coarse-grained caching (2 comments): "caching is still very primitive and coarse-grained" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46214542)) "at some point CircleCI was so slow at saving+restoring cache that it was actually faster to just download all the deps" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46140869)) - Pricing tied to concurrent runs (3 comments): "It's not obfuscated. The free plan gives you a max of 5 concurrent self-hosted runners." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46299748)) "CircleCI charges for concurrent job runs (which include self-hosted runs), no?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46297055)) "mostly because of HOW they charge, it would be $3000" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46295946)) - Recurring outages and reliability issues (3 comments): "I am now _required_ to consult status page of github, circleci or MS services" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49729513)) "CircleCI has been this bad for 10+ years and they’re still in business." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47970284)) "circleci's semi-regular (but thankfully short) outages" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47951166)) - Botched generalist migration, weaker than rivals (2 comments): "CircleCI botched the migration from the specialist to generalist model" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46909052)) "it is absolutely not better than GitHub Actions" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46191585)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [GitHub Actions](https://hackerapproved.com/p/github-actions.md): 234 recommend - [Jenkins](https://hackerapproved.com/p/jenkins.md): 67 recommend - [GitLab CI](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gitlab-ci.md): 56 recommend - [Dagger](https://hackerapproved.com/p/dagger.md): 43 recommend - [Woodpecker CI](https://hackerapproved.com/p/woodpecker-ci.md): 37 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://circleci.com/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "CircleCI", https://hackerapproved.com/p/circleci/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).