HomeBlogSoftware Development
Published Oct 26, 2023 ⦁ 10 min read

Top 10 DevOps Tools to Streamline Software Delivery in 2023

Introduction

Over the past decade, DevOps practices have seen rapid growth and adoption across software organizations. By combining development and operations, DevOps aims to shorten cycles and enable continuous delivery of software updates. With the quickening pace of technology innovation and digital disruption, having the ability to frequently deploy high-quality code is more critical than ever before. Adopting DevOps workflows and selecting the right tools can help teams release features faster, reduce failures, and optimize the entire software lifecycle.

This definitive guide will provide a ranked list of the top 10 DevOps tools for 2023, covering essential categories like CI/CD, monitoring, collaboration, and more. The goal is to showcase the leading solutions that empower developers to work smarter, move quicker, and boost efficiency. Whether you're just starting your DevOps journey or looking to improve existing processes, these tools will help automate tasks, increase visibility, and enable seamless collaboration. With the optimal mix of devops tools tailored to your workflows, teams can achieve rapid development cycles and continuous delivery of software innovations.

What is DevOps?

Before diving into the tools, let's briefly explain what DevOps entails. DevOps combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to shorten cycles and enable continuous delivery of updates. It brings together development, quality assurance, security, and operations teams to collaborate on delivering business value rapidly.

Here are some key DevOps practices:

  • Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) - Automating builds, tests, and deployments to improve release frequency
  • Infrastructure as Code - Programmatically managing infrastructure and configs
  • Monitoring - Insights into systems, apps, services, and business metrics
  • Collaboration tools - Enabling teams to plan, track, discuss, and share work

With the right blend of culture, processes, and devops tools, organizations can reap the benefits of DevOps - faster innovation, fewer defects, and better customer satisfaction.

How We Ranked the Top DevOps Tools

With the expansive DevOps landscape filled with hundreds of tools, how did we identify the 10 leading options? We evaluated both open source and commercial tools against criteria such as:

  • Popularity and adoption - Number of users and market share
  • Capabilities - Feature set, scalability, and depth
  • Usability - Learning curve, configuration complexity, UX
  • Integration - Interoperability with diverse workflows
  • Community - Documentation, responsiveness, resources

We placed the most weight on flexibility, ecosystem, and strong community backing. Cost was considered but ranked lower than other factors. Tools that can scale from small teams to enterprises scored higher. Robust capabilities, broad platform support, a wealth of integrations, and excellent community resources were all heavily prioritized.

DevOps Tool Categories

The top 10 DevOps tools fall into these key categories:

  • CI/CD - Workflow automation
  • Source control - Code collaboration and version control
  • Containerization - Build, manage, and deploy containers
  • Monitoring - Infrastructure, app, and business visibility
  • Collaboration - Communication, task and project coordination
  • Testing - Automated testing frameworks and services
  • Security - Scanning, secrets management, policy enforcement
  • Configuration - Infrastructure provisioning and management
  • Artifact management - Binary repository management

For each section, we highlight tools best suited for that category based on the capabilities required. The top priority was meeting core functional needs, flexibility, ease of use, and cost.

Top CI/CD Tools

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) are essential for automating builds, tests, and deployments. By adopting CI/CD, teams can release updates frequently with more stability. Many options can facilitate CI/CD, from standalone tools to orchestrated combinations.

Key CI/CD criteria:

  • Workflow and pipeline automation
  • Integration with source control
  • Build, test, and deploy automation
  • Scalability from small to large teams
  • Flexible configuration vs ease of use
  • Third-party integrations
  • Open source vs SaaS

Leading CI/CD tools:

  • Jenkins
  • CircleCI
  • Travis CI
  • GitLab CI
  • AWS CodePipeline
  • GitHub Actions
  • TeamCity
  • Bamboo
  • Azure Pipelines

#1 Jenkins

Jenkins is the leading open source automation server for CI/CD workflows. With over 1,000 plugins, it can integrate with virtually any DevOps toolchain. Jenkins is highly flexible and extensible for diverse pipelines from simple to complex. Pipelines can be defined as code for version control.

Key features:

  • Open source with strong community
  • 1000+ plugins for endless integrations
  • Scales from solo devs to enterprises
  • Distributed builds across multiple systems
  • Declarative pipelines and pipelines as code
  • Abundant libraries and extensions
  • Robust commercial ecosystem

Jenkins requires more technical expertise compared to some SaaS options. But for open source flexibility and customization, it leads the pack.

#2 CircleCI

CircleCI provides a popular SaaS platform to automate CI/CD workflows. It offers prebuilt integrations for major tools like GitHub, Docker, AWS and more. Out of the box, CircleCI includes robust capabilities like parallel jobs, automated testing, deployment approvals, and release management.

Key features:

  • SaaS convenience with low overhead
  • Prebuilt integrations via CircleCI orbs
  • Easy workflow automation
  • Scales from small teams to enterprises
  • Good docs and community
  • Free for individuals, paid tiers for larger teams

For teams wanting automated SaaS simplicity, CircleCI is a top choice with generous free tiers for getting started.

Top Source Code Tools

Version control enables developers to collaborate on code and track changes. Hosted Git platforms provide centralized repositories for teams to coordinate. The best options balance capabilities against complexity.

Key Git platform criteria:

  • Repository management and collaboration
  • Access controls, security, governance
  • Integration ecosystem
  • On premises vs SaaS
  • Open source vs commercial

Leading Git tools:

  • GitHub
  • GitLab
  • Bitbucket
  • Azure DevOps Repos
  • AWS CodeCommit
  • Perforce HelixCore
  • Beanstalk

#1 GitHub

GitHub has become the default for open source and private Git repositories. It offers extensive capabilities for repository management, code review, project coordination, and CI/CD automation.

Key features:

  • 50+ million developers with 200+ million repos
  • Pull requests, issues, wiki, projects, code review, automation
  • GitHub Actions for workflow automation
  • GitHub Pages for hosting sites on repos
  • Huge Marketplace of apps and integrations
  • Plans from free to fully managed

With its massive community and ecosystem, GitHub delivers outstanding capabilities and simplicity.

#2 GitLab

GitLab offers an open core alternative to GitHub, combining Git repository management with integrated DevOps tooling. GitLab includes built-in CI/CD, monitoring, security, issue tracking, wiki, and more. Having an integrated DevOps platform improves visibility.

Key features:

  • Open source core with enterprise add-ons
  • Integrated toolchain - plan, code, test, secure, deploy
  • Built-in CI/CD, monitoring, app security
  • Self-managed or SaaS/cloud options
  • Free and paid tiers for all team sizes
  • Powerful API for custom integrations

For integrated DevOps workflows under one platform, GitLab is a top option with robust capabilities rivaling GitHub.

Top Container Tools

Containers like Docker have transformed building, sharing, and deploying applications. Containers provide portable, isolated workloads that run consistently. Container orchestrators like Kubernetes then automate operating containers at scale.

Key container tool criteria:

  • Easy to build container images
  • Portability across diverse infrastructure
  • Scalable orchestration capabilities
  • Hosted vs self-managed options
  • Ecosystem and community

Leading options:

  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • Red Hat OpenShift
  • AWS ECS
  • Google Cloud Run
  • HashiCorp Nomad
  • VMware Tanzu
  • Azure Container Instances

#1 Docker

Docker pioneered containers and remains the standard. Developers can build containerized apps from simple containers to full microservices. Docker provides an easy way to package apps with dependencies into portable images.

Key features:

  • Quickly build, test, store, and deploy containers
  • Isolate app dependencies into lightweight containers
  • Central image repository with Docker Hub
  • Orchestrate multi-container apps across hosts
  • Local Docker Desktop for development
  • Integrates with orchestrators like Kubernetes

For getting started with containers, Docker makes it simple for developers to build modern, portable applications.

#2 Kubernetes

Kubernetes has emerged as the leading open source container orchestrator. It radically simplifies deploying, scaling, and managing containerized apps across environments. Kubernetes delivers powerful automation for running containers anywhere.

Key features:

  • Open source with support across vendors
  • Automates container deployment, scaling, networking
  • Massive ecosystem of tools/integrations
  • Managed services like EKS, AKS, GKE
  • Modular and extensible
  • Steep but valuable learning curve

While complex, Kubernetes has become the standard for production-grade container orchestration thanks to its flexible capabilities and ubiquitous support. It brings reliability and scale to container workloads.

Top Monitoring Tools

Monitoring provides essential visibility into infrastructure, apps, user experience, and business performance. Effective monitoring is critical for meeting SLAs, troubleshooting rapidly, and optimization.

Key monitoring criteria:

  • Breadth of integrations across stacks
  • Analytics, alerting, visualization capabilities
  • Open source vs SaaS models
  • On premises vs cloud delivery
  • Easy to use vs advanced capabilities

Leading monitoring tools:

  • Datadog
  • New Relic
  • Splunk
  • Elastic Stack
  • SolarWinds
  • Dynatrace
  • AppDynamics
  • Grafana
  • Prometheus
  • Azure Monitor

#1 Datadog

Datadog is a robust cloud monitoring platform delivering complete visibility across infrastructure, apps, logs, metrics, and tests. It offers 350+ integrations to monitor all major tools and cloud providers. Datadog simplifies monitoring for DevOps with out of the box dashboards, anomaly detection, collaboration, and more.

Key features:

  • Broad infrastructure, app, and log monitoring
  • Powerful analytics, alerting, tracing, visualization
  • Over 350 platform integrations
  • Intuitive dashboarding across all data
  • Scales from small teams to enterprise
  • 14-day free trial and usage-based pricing

With its ease of use and actionable insights, Datadog is a premier choice for monitoring modern cloud stacks.

#2 New Relic

New Relic delivers extensive application monitoring focused on troubleshooting and improving complex systems. It provides deep visibility into app architecture, dependencies, and performance to pinpoint issues rapidly.

Key features:

  • Detailed performance monitoring for web/mobile apps
  • Infrastructure monitoring for cloud/Kubernetes
  • APM traces transaction paths across systems
  • Powerful analytics and alerting
  • Team collaboration features
  • Generous forever-free tier

For APM across critical apps, New Relic excels at identifying root causes in modern web and mobile apps.

Essential DevOps Tools

Beyond the major categories discussed, additional tools play key roles in DevOps workflows. Here are some other must-have DevOps tools:

Testing

  • Selenium - Popular open source test automation framework
  • JUnit - Java unit testing framework

Security

  • Qualys - Leading cloud security and compliance

Configuration Management

  • Chef - Infrastructure and app config management

Artifact Management

  • JFrog Artifactory - Binary repository manager

While impossible to cover everything, this cross-section represents essential DevOps capabilities to consider. Choose tools that integrate into a cohesive toolchain tailored to your tech stack and workflows.

Key Takeaways

Implementing effective DevOps requires the right blend of processes, culture, and tools. This list covers top DevOps tools for optimizing workflows, enabling collaboration, providing visibility, and accelerating delivery.

Core capabilities like CI/CD, source control, containers, monitoring, and collaboration are essential for any high-velocity engineering team. When evaluating options, consider your team's size, tech stack, use cases and scalability needs.

With the right building blocks, teams can optimize their DevOps practices and outcomes. Take an iterative approach by tackling the most critical bottlenecks first. Then layer on capabilities that drive the greatest business value.

With optimized devops tools aligned to processes and people, your team can achieve rapid development cycles and continuous delivery of innovative, reliable software. The goal is delighting customers by accelerating innovation, reducing defects, and responding faster to the market.

If you found this guide valuable, explore how DevHunt can help you easily find and evaluate top devops tools to build your ideal workflow. DevHunt's rich discovery platform allows you to filter and compare the leading solutions for CI/CD, source control, containers, monitoring, collaboration, and more in one place.

AutomationDevopsTools

Related posts