The app growth stack

Comparison

Mobile CI/CD, compared

Every iOS team eventually stops archiving by hand at midnight. The choice is mostly about who owns code signing and what a macOS build minute costs you.

There is no ranking on this page. Nobody here has run all 7 of these for a quarter, so a score would be invented. What follows is the shortlist, in alphabetical order, with one line on what separates each — and a link to the vendor’s own pricing page, because a price restated here would be out of date before you read it.

  • Appcircle

    Mobile CI/CD covering build, signing and distribution in one product.

    Visit sitePublishes no price

  • Bitrise

    Mobile-only CI/CD with a large library of prebuilt steps to assemble a workflow from.

    Visit sitePublishes no price

  • Codemagic

    CI/CD covering native iOS and Android alongside Flutter and React Native.

    Visit sitePublishes no price

  • fastlane

    Open-source automation you run yourself — building, signing, screenshots and upload. Underlies much of the hosted tooling in this group rather than competing with it.

    Visit sitePublishes no price

  • Runway

    Not a build service: release coordination across the people and steps involved in shipping one.

    Visit sitePublishes no price

  • Tuist

    Xcode project generation and build infrastructure, aimed at keeping a large project buildable rather than at running the pipeline.

    Visit sitePublishes no price

  • Xcode Cloud

    Apple’s own, built into Xcode and wired directly to TestFlight and App Store Connect with no signing setup of its own.

    Visit sitePublishes no price

What you have to check yourself

None of this is knowable from outside, and it is where the decision actually gets made.

  • Who holds your signing certificates and provisioning profiles, and what happens when they expire mid-release.
  • What a macOS build minute costs and how long your build actually takes. That product is the real bill, and it is the number nobody estimates correctly up front.
  • How quickly it supports a new Xcode version. A required-Xcode deadline you cannot build against is an outage, not an inconvenience.
  • Whether TestFlight upload works without extra plumbing.
  • Whether you could leave. A pipeline expressed as fastlane lanes moves between services; one expressed in a vendor’s UI does not.

Every link on this page was fetched and answered before it shipped, most recently on 2026-09-01. No tool paid to appear here and no link earns anything — see the disclosure page. Missing, wrong, or out of date? Tell us and it gets fixed.

See the full build & release section for tools in this category that are not part of this comparison.

Other comparisons