TeamCity vs FinalBuilder Pro for Continuous Integration Server

Question

I have seen lots of comparisons for TeamCity vs CCNet, but not much for TeamCity vs FinalBuilder Pro's CI.

Forgive me if I am not comparing apples to apples, I am familiar with TeamCity however the company I work for has already purchased FinalBuilder Pro which has a CI Server included.

I'm hoping to get some comparisons, opinions. If TeamCity does not offer more above FinalBuilder we do not want to have to support two systems.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Here are some features present in TeamCity and unlikely present in FinalBuilder:

• True client server-architecture with multiple build agents - TeamCity provides a central point of accessing and managing all of your build agents. Build agents can be enabled/disabled/restarted from single Web-UI, you can also view logs or view thread dumps of builds running on different build agents.
• Support of Amazon EC for build agents grid
• Pre-tested commit and remote run features (no more broken code in VCS. Well, almost :)
• Integration with Visual Studio and other IDEs - a dedicated plugin for that
• Extensible reporting, you can include your own HTML-based reports into build results
• Comments/Pin/Tags for builds
• Cross-build search

• Integrated code coverage and duplicates finder for Java and .NET

  FinalBuilder has support of some VCS systems, which are not supported by TeamCity, though.

  Disclaimer: I'm one of TeamCity developers.

Answer 2

We are using TeamCity for the build orchestration, but using FinalBuilder to actually carry out the individual builds.

I love FinalBuilder for the ease of scripting and maintainability, but I also love TeamCity for all the points in KIR's answer.

In our setup, each TeamCity buildconfig is configured to use the commandline runner, and finalbuilder's fbcmd.exe is invoked with the name of a script to run.

All sweetness and light.

Answer 3

I have done a comparison of the 2 products for a continuous integration talk in the Uk - basically my findings were that TeamCity was more intuitive to use. FinalBuilder seemed to me to be ambigious in its language and seemed to be clunky to set up builds

Once the work was done it was a very good system - but for me TeamCity was much more intuitive and had a better user experience than Final Builder

this is very subjective though - each tool is very good. It comes down to what you are comfortable with and I was much more comfortable with TeamCity