With the right continuous delivery tools, you can accelerate software delivery, enhance reliability, and streamline deployments. Use this guide to select the best tools for your needs and drive innovation seamlessly.
A QUICK SUMMARY – FOR THE BUSY ONES
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Your organization is growing, and you realize that current processes can’t support the demand for software delivery anymore. You know that, without continuous delivery tools, the existing systems frequently fail during deployments or post-launch, leading to customer dissatisfaction. At the same time, stakeholders demand faster delivery, more innovation, or better alignment between technology and business outcomes. You know that there’s only one good solution: to adopt an agile, DevOps, or cloud-native approach – and appropriate tools.
You’re aware that the tool selection is very broad and complex but you’re not sure how new tools will fit into the existing tech stack and workflows. Balancing the cost of tools against the perceived ROI and business value can be very challenging, too. You may also struggle to ensure that the tools meet security and regulatory standards. What can make the process even more difficult are legacy systems and infrastructure that make adopting new tools demanding.
To make an informed decision and choose the best set, it’s vital to explore various software delivery tools available in the market. Navigating the complex landscape of continuous delivery tools may certainly require help from an experienced partner. Actionable tips on tool selection, implementation, and best practices may be just what you need to make a bold move into the world of modern CD tools.
But why would you ever want to use them? Well, the number of reasons is huge. There are many benefits that tools for continuous delivery bring to the table. They streamline the software delivery process, making it fully automated from development to deployment.
Some of the related advantages include:
Automated testing tools can run regression tests on each new code commit, ensuring that changes don’t break existing functionality. Automated monitoring tools track performance and system health after each deployment, providing instant feedback to the development team. These practices ensure that updates are delivered regularly, securely, and with minimal disruption to business operations. - "From Vision to Code: A Guide to Aligning Business Strategy with Software Development Goals" Report by Brainhub
When selecting CD tools, it’s good if you pay attention to the following factors:
Now, let’s have a look at some of the best tools for continuous delivery that seem to be the most promising and powerful in the year ahead.
Automating the software development lifecycle in order to speed it up requires the best continuous delivery tools for CI/CD pipeline orchestration – managing the way tasks work together. Here are the best ones for 2025:
GitLab has been named a Leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for DevOps Platforms. Its built-in module meant for CI/CD – a complex solution that covers a version control system and a tool for completing CI/CD – is one of many in the company’s offer.
Other highlights include strong support from the community, easy implementation, version control, and free trial. The AI-powered platform is also integrated with major cloud providers and Kubernetes. However, some users complain about the steep learning curve and insufficient documentation.
While using GitLab for personal projects is free, the Premium plan (for scaling organizations and multi-team usage) costs $29 per user per month (billed annually). It covers e.g. container scanning, Jira development panel integration, code quality reports, protected environments, and merge trains.
There’s also the customized Ultimate plan – perfect for organization-wide security, compliance, and planning – that includes priority support, security risk mitigation, vulnerability management, security dashboards, dependency scanning, dynamic application security testing, security dashboards, issue and epic health reporting, and 50,000 compute minutes per month.
CircleCI, a powerful CI/CD tool, is loved for speed, flexibility, user-friendly interface, reliability, and efficiency – and used by giants such as Meta, Microsoft, Adobe, and Airbnb. However, it’s easy to set up and get started for a way larger group of clients. It offers a wide range of infrastructure options that can suit virtually any business.
Although it’s free at the entry level (cloud plan), prices at the enterprise level start from $2000 per month, which can be (and often is) regarded as rather pricy. Plus, there is a complex system of credits which may be difficult to calculate. However, for those who are not discouraged by this and are willing to pay, CircleCI can deliver a 664% return on investment (ROI) over a three-year period.
The enterprise-level plan (called Scale) offers access to 24/7 ticket-based global support, all environments, even GPU, 200 GB of storage, config policies, single sign-on (SSO), as well as the unlimited number of concurrent tasks per self-hosted runner.
As for security, CircleCI comes with a wide range of solutions, including:
Moreover, CircleCI is SOC 2 Type II compliant and FedRAMP tailored.
CircleCI offers strong integration capabilities, e.g. with Android, AWS CLI, AWS CodeDeploy, Azure CLI, Docker Hub, Flutter, GitHub, Google Cloud CLI, Heroku, Jira, Kubernetes, macOS, Node, Oxygen, Rust, Salesforce SFDX, Slack, Snyk, Thundra, and Windows.
Leaders looking to overcome bottlenecks in their software release processes may also take advantage of the best continuous delivery tools for deployment automation. Some of them are:
With Microsoft Azure DevOps, the overall project lifecycle, including deployment, is highly automated and standardized. It’s also very comprehensive, with Agile boards made for multiple tasks. Cloud-based, reliable, cost-effective, and user-friendly, with easy end-to-end development integration, Azure DevOps works best when used with other Microsoft products. Integration with platforms and tools from outside of the Azure family can be a bit challenging.
Microsoft Azure DevOps tool received Gartner’s Customers’ Choice title for 2023; the number of features it comes with can satisfy even the most demanding users. For instance, tags, tickets, and source control systems make the whole work smooth and well-organized. However, task management and planning are not intuitive and it may require some time for a team to learn all the ins and outs to make the most of this platform.
Free versions are possible – for both individual services and user licenses. As for GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps, the fee is $49 per committer per month. It covers a full suite of security tools native to Azure DevOps, secret scanning, code scanning, and dependency scanning.
AWS CodeDeploy enables automation and constant deployment of applications across various development, test, and production environments. The deployment statuses of applications can be easily launched and tracked – and deployments to thousands of hosts can be managed. The existing setup code can be reused and application deployment may be repeated across different groups or instances easily.
Advanced deployment techniques can be used and multiple deployment types are supported, e.g. in-place, canary, and blue/green deployments. Application deployments to a variety of compute services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda, and on-premises instances, are possible.
Being platform and language-agnostic, CodeDeploy works with any application, so your existing setup code can be reused. It also integrates with popular third-party tools. It’s easy to use, automate, and deploy, and flexibility and security make it an even better option. However, the setup process and learning curve may be a bit demanding.
You can calculate your AWS CodeDeploy and architecture cost here. In the case of CodeDeploy on-premises, you pay $0.02 per on-premises instance update using CodeDeploy. AWS also offers a free tier for 12 months.
If you want to know more about how CD tools can change your software releases – and your entire business – for the better, download Brainhub’s expert report "From Vision to Code: A Guide to Aligning Business Strategy with Software Development Goals"
As automated doesn’t mean hands-off, you need efficient tools for tracking deployments in real time to react promptly. These best continuous delivery tools for monitoring and observability are a perfect means for that:
Datadog prides itself on „bringing together end-to-end traces, metrics, and logs to make your applications, infrastructure, and third-party services entirely observable.” With this tool, you can track „tens of thousands of infrastructure metrics out-of-the-box”. All your databases, containers, cloud services, and serverless functions can be monitored in one place with Datadog’s 800+ vendor-backed integrations.
The Pro plan that covers all these, starts at $15 per host per month (billed annually). In turn, the Enterprise plan (from $23 per host per month) offers more advanced features and administrative controls, like automated insights, correlations, anomaly detection, forecast monitoring, cloud workload security, anomalous workload profile detection, and IP allowlist. Machine learning-based alerts and live processes are in the mix, too.
There are also other plans available, including DevSecOps Enterprise (starting at $34 per host per month) which comes with advanced risk and threat detection capabilities and includes file integrity monitoring and Cloud Workload Security (CWS) for Linux, Windows, Kubernetes, Docker, and AWS Fargate ECS/EKS.
Observability across CI/CD pipelines is unparalleled and extensive training is not necessary to get started and obtain advanced real-time monitoring, detailed performance metrics, and extensive integration. A free trial is possible and multi-year/volume discounts are available.
Comprehensive monitoring is one of the many functions of the integrated GitLab platform. Pipeline efficiency can be tracked with advanced CI/CD analytics and presented on pipeline graphs. Monitoring – that is to help reduce the severity and frequency of incidents – can also be performed with the help of:
For more information about the GitLab CI/CD tool, see above.
If you want to avoid the release chaos and make sure that environments are provisioned the same way every time, you may try one of these CD tools for Infrastructure as Code integration:
Easy to set up and start with, Spacelift offers a great number of useful features and fantastic support when things go wrong. It promotes a unified approach for deployment in teams that use multiple IaC tools, streamlining the whole process. Plus, it supports all modern cloud environments, IaC tools, and multi-IaC workflows for AWS CloudFormation, Ansible, Terraform, Terragrunt, OpenTofu, Pulumi, and Kubernetes. Also, with Spacelift, you can use any linter or security scanner.
Spacelift can be called a „sophisticated CI/CD abstraction layer on top of all popular OpenSource Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools or wrappers.” It’s meant for IaC management, is vendor agnostic, and highly flexible, with unlimited policies and integrations, a lot of built-in guards, stack dependencies, drift detection and remediation, and self-service infrastructure via Blueprints.
There are several pricing plans available, including Starter/Starter +, Business, and Enterprise – in any of them, a 14-day free trial is available. Starter/Starter + plan costs $399 per month and covers 10 users; In the case of Business and Enterprise plans the number of users is unlimited, and the pricing is customized.
Terraform is an IaC tool that lets engineers define their cloud resources and software infrastructure in code – and thus manage large distributed systems at scale. It’s great for automating repetitive tasks – the key features include infrastructure automation, automated provisioning, version control, parallel execution, and reporting and logging.
It’s often praised for ease of use, user-friendliness, cloud services, automation, versatility, security (it’s good to use Terraform security scanners, though), modularity, and features, while complexity, steep learning curve, potential conflicts, and delayed updates are an issue for some.
Terraform is platform-agnostic and supports all major cloud service providers. This tool can serve as a unified solution to manage cloud infrastructure within an organization. Multi-cloud deployment management is one of Terraform’s major features.
Terraform is free to get started in the case of Free (that covers up to 500 resources per month) and Standard (starting at $0.00014 per hour per resource) plans. As for more comprehensive Plus and Enterprise plans, pricing is customized.
Continuous delivery tools can be very useful and help you avoid many troubles along the software development process. But that doesn’t mean that they come without any issues and adopting them is nothing but a walk in the park. Yes, there are some possible drawbacks involved. Luckily, they can be prevented.
Some of the common pitfalls to avoid include not drawing enough attention to keeping the workflow and teamwork well-defined. To make the most of CI/CD tools and frameworks, the entire organization and its team members need to be aware of all responsibilities, processes, procedures, and deadlines, as the collaborative CD approach should underpin the corporate culture as a whole.
Also, as code changes within the CI/CD workflow are automatically deployed to production, it’s vital to ensure thorough testing to limit the risks and the number of bugs during software releases. Of course, it’s crucial to make sure that automation, a CD’s intrinsic value, is in full action at every step – otherwise, some critical issues may be missed.
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Software development enthusiast with 7 years of professional experience in the tech industry. Experienced in outsourcing market analysis, with a special focus on nearshoring. In the meantime, our expert in explaining tech, business, and digital topics in an accessible way. Writer and translator after hours.
Software development enthusiast with 7 years of professional experience in the tech industry. Experienced in outsourcing market analysis, with a special focus on nearshoring. In the meantime, our expert in explaining tech, business, and digital topics in an accessible way. Writer and translator after hours.
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