Concourse CI
CI/CDA container-based CI/CD system that you host yourself, where pipelines are defined in YAML as resources, jobs and tasks.
Open-source alternative to:
CircleCI
What the free edition leaves out
The free edition covers the features teams usually need; we found nothing important held back. “Not confirmed” means the official pages we read did not say, so we do not guess.
| Feature | Free edition | Details | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| SSO / SAML | Free | The auth docs list a Generic SAML connector, along with Generic OIDC, Generic OAuth, LDAP, GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, Bitbucket Cloud, Microsoft and CF/UAA. Nothing on the page is marked as paid. | Source ↗ |
| Role-based access control | Free | Five roles: Concourse Admin (owners of the main team), owner, member, pipeline-operator and viewer. The --config-rbac flag on concourse web can move specific actions between roles. Nothing is marked as paid. | Source ↗ |
| Audit logs | Not confirmed | Not mentioned on the docs pages read. | Source ↗ |
| Multi-user / teams | Free | Teams with their own members, authorized through the auth connectors above. | Source ↗ |
| Backups and restore | Not confirmed | No backup feature found in the docs index. State lives in PostgreSQL, so backups would be database backups; this was not confirmed in the docs. | Source ↗ |
| API access | Not confirmed | The fly CLI talks to the server, but no public API reference was found on the docs index. | Source ↗ |
| Support SLA | Not confirmed | Community support on Discord and GitHub Discussions. Paid support, training and consulting are offered by Pixel Air IO, described as run by the maintainers. No SLA is stated. | Source ↗ |
Best for
Teams that want declarative, container-based pipelines with every build step running in a clean container, and that are comfortable running their own Postgres and workers.
Why choose it over CircleCI
Apache 2.0 licensed, with no pricing page or paid edition found. SAML, OIDC, LDAP and several Git-host logins are documented with no tier marked as paid. Pipelines are YAML based and use resources and tasks, so they can be kept in version control.
Where it falls short
There is no hosted service from the project, so you run web nodes, workers and PostgreSQL yourself. Pipelines have a learning curve because they use a model of resources, jobs and tasks rather than a simple script. No audit logging, backup tooling or public API reference was found. Commercial support exists only through a third party, with no stated SLA.
Open-source alternative to
- CircleCI — Concourse is a free, self-hosted pipeline system that covers the same job as CircleCI's hosted pipelines.
Category
CI/CDTopics
Tech stack
Go
DockerLanguages as reported by GitHub for the repository.
