CircleCI is a cloud and self-hosted CI/CD platform. See free credits, paid plans, Orbs, Docker caching, and key features for automating builds and deploys.
CircleCI is a continuous integration and delivery platform founded in 2011 in San Francisco by Paul Biggar and Allen Rohner. Following CircleCI's 2014 acquisition of Distiller, Jim Rose and Rob Zuber joined as CEO and CTO and led the company's growth into a widely used CI/CD platform with roughly 358 employees today.
The platform automates building, testing, and deploying code through pipelines defined as configuration, supporting Docker, Linux, Windows, macOS, and ARM execution environments, and offers both a cloud-hosted service and an on-premises Server deployment.
CircleCI's Orbs let teams package and reuse pipeline configuration across projects instead of rewriting deployment logic repeatedly, and Docker Layer Caching can cut a 12-minute Docker build down to roughly 90 seconds by reusing cached image layers between runs.
Access controls, SSO, and priority support are available on higher tiers, while the on-premises Server plan gives organizations with strict compliance or data-residency requirements full control over their CI/CD infrastructure.
CircleCI prices usage in credits, a universal unit consumed by compute time and storage, at a baseline rate of about $0.0006 per credit. The Free plan includes 30,000 credits per month and up to 5 active users.
The Performance plan starts at $15/month with the same base credits and users but unlocks more resource classes, extra users cost $15 each, and additional credit packs (25,000 credits for $15) can be purchased. The Scale plan starts around $2,000/month for custom credit volumes, SSO, and 24/7 support, and the Server plan offers on-premises deployment with custom pricing.
Yes, CircleCI has a free plan that includes 30,000 credits per month and up to 5 active users, though it excludes macOS, GPU, and the largest resource classes.
CircleCI uses a universal credits system consumed by compute time and storage, priced at roughly $0.0006 per credit, with standard packs of 25,000 credits sold for $15.
Yes, CircleCI offers a Server plan for on-premises, Kubernetes-based deployment with unlimited build minutes and 30 included seats, priced on a custom basis.
CircleCI was founded in 2011 in San Francisco by Paul Biggar and Allen Rohner. Jim Rose (CEO) and Rob Zuber (CTO) joined in 2014 following the acquisition of Distiller and now lead the company.
Orbs are reusable, shareable packages of CircleCI configuration that let teams package common pipeline logic, such as deployment steps, instead of rewriting it for every project.
CircleCI integrates with GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket for source control and pull-request-triggered pipelines.