Hudson vs Jenkins in 2012 [closed]

Question

I have used both Hudson and Jenkins. I have been following both change lists.

I still think we made the right choice by moving from Hudson to Jenkins. The Hudson core developers are now working on Jenkins. Those who are still employed by Oracle are the ones mainly supporting Hudson (as far as I am aware the Apache Maven people are contributing fixes as well).

I've filed a number of bugs back in the Hudson era. I can tell you most of them were resolved in Jenkins. Many months after their resolution, the Hudson people fixed or asked for further input on those particular bugs.

The majority of the plugin developers (almost all, that is) have migrated their plugins to Jenkins and now support Jenkins mainly. In terms of plugins Jenkins is developing much, much faster. There are now some paid plugins provided by Cloudbees.

As far as I am aware, the open source community has moved in it's majority to Jenkins.

Some companies who prefer to have paid support and don't want the hassle of migrating to Jenkins are still using Hudson. Frankly, I don't see why. Jenkins has commercial support too from Cloudbees, which is where Kohsuke Kawaguchi (the creator of Hudson) now works. Cloudbees now even have a free service for hosting GitHub hosted projects in their cloud. They let your OSS projects build for free! :)

Jenkins has improved it's support for the cloud. As mentioned above, Cloudbees also provide this SaaS in the cloud. I am not sure if and to what extent Hudson supports this. I think they're not so advanced at the moment; whatever the case, Hudson doesn't provide a SaaS for the cloud, as far as I am aware.

My opinion is that if you have to pick one, it should be Jenkins.

In terms of stability, for over a year Jenkins has offered a Long-Term Support (LTS) version for people who want to be more assured about the stability and support of the software they're installing.

Every three months or so, a previous release is selected which has been deemed as working well by the community of Jenkins users. This version is then branched, any important fixes (which have been "battle-tested") are backported into this Jenkins version, and then this release gets extra testing by various people and companies. Once it's ready for release, this becomes the new LTS version.

As new high-priority fixes come along, these are backported to the LTS version.

Numerous large users of Jenkins stick to the LTS line of releases, and according to the public Jenkins usage statistics, several thousand deployments are using it.

This should mean the LTS version you are downloading is even more stable than a random version chosen from the usual weekly release line.

Beyond the statistics, the situation regarding Jenkins usage, community size, its level of development, rate of new features added, number of new plugins and mailing list activity in comparison to Hudson doesn't seem to have changed (i.e. Jenkins remains ever-further ahead).

Basically, most of the points made in this previous discussion still apply, though the initial corporate support of Hudson appears to have subsided a little.

I think https://stackoverflow.com/a/5970813/556520 answers a lot of important questions about the hudson vs jenkins issue. The topic explains both sides of the situation with pros and cons for each product.

From personal experience working with CI for years, and recently started developing for Hudson, I would stick with the stable version of hudson just because jenkins is doing more development and support for their cloudbees service, where hudson has moved to the eclipse foundation and is not developing for a service. That's just my $0.02.