Incredibuild Reviews

Pros

This software is incredibly user-friendly and saves us a significant amount of time, allowing us to focus on other essential store operations. Its convenience and accessibility make our work and life easier. Whenever we require assistance, we receive prompt answers and replies.

Cons

There are no drawbacks. This software is a valuable addition to our store operations.

Pros

Setup and configuration is a very hassle free process. Also it is quite useful but particularly only when you're working with a slower pool of computers.

Cons

The 4 core package limits usage to 4 cores per machine even on our own computers. Once you have more powerful systems like 12 or 16 core machines, it becomes much less appealing compared with the basic free parallel build in Visual Studio. In our case that 4 core limit noticeably slowed down daily compilations and upgrading beyond 4 cores is unfortunately very expensive.

Pros

It exceeded our expectations by working flawlessly right out of the box. Despite our projects being immensely large, we were pleasantly surprised by the quick setup and build time. Even with the templastic code triggering a domino effect, the software compiled in just 4 to 5 minutes on our 8-core CPU machine.

Cons

When I click "compile" on my PC, it feels like the whole building is taking off like a helicopter. The CPU fans on over 50 computers on our floor start throttling up, which is quite impressive as well.

Pros

Watching an 8 hour Visual Studio build drop to just 45 minutes after rolling out Incredibuild was honestly impressive even before any extra tuning or build optimization was done. Another big plus is that it runs well on the hardware we already have including both workstations and servers, without causing any noticeable performance hit.

Cons

Licensing model is the major problem. You need separate license bundles for each technology, like C++, C# or make and additional bundles if you want to use multi-core machines. Over time that can make the product much more expensive.

Pros

The ability to run distributed builds gives us a big performance boost. As it makes the process of building our product much faster so we can iterate more quickly.

Cons

It can create a bit of a Jevons paradox, where faster builds make it easier to get careless about organizing code properly to avoid compile slowdowns. Starting XGE builds for tools also has to be done through an executable since there is no API available to start, monitor, add or remove distributed tasks alongside current builds or cancel them. Having that kind of flexibility would be especially useful when the same PC is kicking off multiple builds. We have also run into stability problems and crashes in our builds and these seem to get worse with more team members working remotely.

Pros

One of the best parts of this software is how simply it cuts our product build time in a major way without needing any additional resources.

Cons

The cloud option runs within your own cloud environment, excluding IBM Cloud so I would say it isn't a fully SaaS solution.

Pros

Build times are noticeably shorter with Incredibuild, whether it's running on desktops or servers. Getting it set up and plugged into existing Visual Studio projects was also easy and didn't take much effort.

Cons

Limitations around different helper types can be annoying. Licensing is also split up by the kind of workload and tools being distributed such as C++, C#, Visual Studio or Makefiles. On top of that nested commands like launching a separate compile process from a pre-build step mean you have to move up to the far more expensive Enterprise edition.

Pros

From the setup and admin side, this software is very easy to roll out and manage. Handling licenses is simple too and it also gives you a quick, clear view of everything happening across the nodes.

Cons

The one improvement I'd really like is deeper job metrics and more visibility into what the software is doing overall. Also it would be especially helpful if that data could be exposed through a REST API or made available for another agent to consume and correlate with tools like Grafana or Elasticsearch.

Pros

The good thing is that with this tool, I can run and build my source code much faster. Overall it has helped cut down build times significantly and the executable gets delivered much more quickly.

Cons

One thing I'd still like to know is whether there is anything available that can be set up on a Unix platform.

Pros

With our large C++ codebase, the distributed compilation has made a big difference for the whole team. We spend far less time waiting on builds and more time actually working. Plus it has reduced compilation time by about half which is a huge benefit for us since a full build can take as long as 4 hours.

Cons

The only thing I'd still want is even more speed. We are already running it across a grid of around 50 machines and I keep wondering whether there's a way to parallelize the workload further and push the build times down even more.