How to choose between Hudson and Jenkins

Question

It took me an hour or so to work out Hudson has only branched recently  Jan 2011  I have no idea how rapid the change of each branch is now  but more importantly  what is the direction each branch is taking and what are key points so one could make a choice between which to go with   Anybody have links to product roadmap and feature differences

User · Answer

I ve got two points to add   One  Hudson Jenkins is all about the plugins   Plugin developers have moved to Jenkins and so should we  the users   Two  I am not personally a big fan of Oracle s products   In fact  I avoid them like the plague   For the money spent on licensing and hardware for an Oracle solution you can hire twice the engineering staff and still have some left over to buy beer every Friday

User · Answer

Up front    I am a Hudson committer and author of the Hudson book  but I was not involved in the whole split of the projects    In any case here is my advice    Check out both and see what fits your needs better   Hudson is going to complete the migration to be a top level Eclipse projects later this year and has gotten a whole bunch of full time developers  QA and others working on the project  It is still going strong and has a lot of users and with being the default CI server at Eclipse it will continue to serve the needs of many Java developers  Looking at the roadmap and plans for the future you can see that after the Maven 3 integration accomplished with the 2 1 0 release a whole bunch of other interesting feature are ahead   http   www eclipse org hudson  Jenkins on the other side has won over many original Hudson users and has a large user community across multiple technologies and also has a whole bunch of developers working on it   At this stage both CI servers are great tools to use and depending on your needs in terms of technology to integrate with one or the other might be better  Both products are available as open source and you can get commercial support from various companies for both    In any case    if you are not using a CI server yet   start now with either of them and you will see huge benefits   Update Jan 2013  After a long process of IP cleanup and further improvements Hudson 3 0 as the first Eclipse foundation approved release is now available

User · Answer

Use Jenkins   Jenkins is the recent fork by the core developers of Hudson  To understand why  you need to know the history of the project  It was originally open source and supported by Sun  Like much of what Sun did  it was fairly open  but there was a bit of benign neglect  The source  trackers  website  etc  were hosted by Sun on their relatively closed java net platform   Then Oracle bought Sun  For various reasons Oracle has not been shy about leveraging what it perceives as its assets  Those include some control over the logistic platform of Hudson  and particularly control over the Hudson name  Many users and contributors weren t comfortable with that and decided to leave   So it comes down to what Hudson vs Jenkins offers  Both Oracle s Hudson and Jenkins have the code  Hudson has Oracle and Sonatype s corporate support and the brand  Jenkins has most of the core developers  the community  and  so far  much more actual work   Read that post I linked up top  then read the rest of these in chronological order   For balance you can read the Hudson Oracle take on it  It s pretty clear to me who is playing defensive and who has real intentions for the project

User · Answer

For those who have mentioned a reconciliation as a potential future for Hudson and Jenkins  with the fact that Jenkins will be joining SPI  it is unlikely at this point they will reconcile

User · Answer

As chmullig wrote  use Jenkins  Some additional points    In fact  arguably it was Oracle who did the forking  And technically  too  that s kinda what happened  It s interesting to see what comes out of  Hudson  though  While the  Winston summarizes the state and rosy future of the Hudson project  stuff they posted on the  new  Hudson website originally seemed like odd humour to me  perhaps this was a purposeful takeover  and the Sonatype guys actually have some big ideas up their sleeve  This analysis  suggesting a deliberate strategy by Oracle Sonatype to oust Kohsuke and crew to create a more  enterprisy  Hudson is a very interesting read  In any case  this brief comparison a fortnight after the split   while not exactly scientific   shows Jenkins to be by far more active of the two projects       and a little background info   The creator of Hudson  Kohsuke Kawaguchi  started the project on his free time  even if he was working for Sun Microsystems and later paid by them to develop it further  As  erickson noted at another SO question        Hudson Jenkins  is the product of a single genius   intellect   Kohsuke Kawaguchi  Because   of that  it s consistent  coherent    and rock solid    After the acquisition by Oracle  Kohsuke didn t hang around for long  due to lack of monitors      -    and went to work for CloudBees  What started in late 2010 as conflict over tools between the dev community and Oracle and ended in the rename fork split is well documented in the links chmullig provided  To me  that whole conundrum speaks  perhaps more than anything else  to Oracle s utter inability or unwillingness to sponsor an open-source project in a way that keeps all parties  Oracle  developers  users  happy  It s not in their DNA or something  as we ve seen in other cases too   Given all of the above  I would personally follow Kohsuke and other core developers in this matter  and go with Jenkins

User · Answer

Jenkins is the new Hudson   It really is more like a rename  not a fork  since the whole development community moved to Jenkins    Oracle is left sitting in a corner holding their old ball  Hudson   but it s just a soul-less project now    C f  Ethereal -  WireShark

User · Answer

Just my take on the matter  three months later   Jenkins has continued the path well-trodden by the original Hudson with frequent releases including many minor updates   Oracle seems to have largely delegated work on the future path for Hudson to the Sonatype team  who has performed some significant changes  especially with respect to Maven   They have jointly moved it to the Eclipse foundation   I would suggest that if you like the sound of    less frequent releases but ones that are more heavily tested for backwards compatibility  more of an  enterprise-style  release cycle  a product focused primarily on strong Maven and or Nexus integration  i e   you have no interest in Gradle and Artifactory etc  professional support offerings from Sonatype or maybe Oracle in preference to Cloudbees etc you don t mind having a smaller community of plugin developers etc      then I would suggest Hudson   Conversely  if you prefer    more frequent updates  even if they require a bit more frequent tweaking and are perhaps slightly riskier in terms of compatibility  more of a  latest and greatest  release cycle  a system with more active community support for e g   other build systems   artifact repositories support offerings from the original creator et al  and or you have no interest in professional support  e g   you re happy as long as you can get a fix in next week s  latest and greatest   a classical OSS-style witches  brew of a development ecosystem   then I would suggest Jenkins   and as a commenter noted  Jenkins now also has  LTS  releases which are maintained on a more  stable  branch     The conservative course would be to choose Hudson now and migrate to Jenkins if must-have features are unavailable   The dynamic course would be to choose Jenkins now and migrate to Hudson if chasing updates becomes too time-consuming to justify

User · Answer

From the Jenkins website  http   jenkins-ci org  the following sums it up      In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server  Built with Java  it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project    Oracle now owns the Hudson trademark  but has licensed it under the Eclipse EPL  Jenkins is on the MIT license  Both Hudson and Jenkins are open-source  Based on the combination of who you work for and personal preference for open-source  the decision is straightforward IMHO   Hope this was helpful

[continuous-integration] How to choose between Hudson and Jenkins?

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