Comparing Azure Pipelines with other CI/CD tools

Azure Pipelines has different features compared to other CI/CD services currently on the market. Let’s take a closer look:

Features	Azure Pipelines	GitHub Actions	GitLab CI	Bitbucket Pipelines
if expression	X	X	-	-
Loop statement	X	-	-	-
Online service – CI/CD minutes free usage per month	1,800	2,000	400	50
Online service – free package storage (GB)	2	0.5	5	1
Self-hosted agents	X	X	X	X
Free users	5	Unlimited	Unlimited	5

Table 1.3 – CI/CD tools comparison

This will help you understand the important factors to consider when you’re trying to decide on the right tool for your CI/CD platform.

Before you start to build a pipeline for application deployment, we must prepare the necessary agent pools, as demonstrated in the next section.