CircleCI announced the most comprehensive, most generous free tier for CI/CD on the market. 

CircleCI's feature-rich Free plan provides every software developer access to premium CI/CD features that lead to more simple, scalable, and collaborative workflows that build in less time. In fact, data proves 50% of development teams using CircleCI deliver software at the elite level, and consistently outperform average development teams.

With nearly every company in every industry becoming increasingly software-based, better testing and validation of software releases is now a top priority among development teams worldwide. Recent research by McKinsey & Company showed that "best-in-class tools are the primary driver of developer velocity. Organizations with strong tools-for planning, development... collaboration, and continuous integration and delivery-are 65 percent more innovative than bottom-quartile companies."

This is why CircleCI has lowered the barrier for entry so that all developers and teams of all sizes, means, and stages can deliver software faster and better.

 "When engineering teams are able to accomplish their goals using CircleCI, we win," said Jim Rose, CEO, CircleCI. "I'm confident that using CircleCI helps teams move faster, become more productive, and deliver software faster. We're investing in our customers' success by unleashing the full power of CircleCI, for free, for everyone."

The new Free plan includes CI/CD features and capabilities formerly only available to teams on paid plans including:

• Up to 6,000 build minutes per month. Choose the right resource class size (S-L) to optimize for speed and power, or to maximize your build minutes.
• Unlimited users. CI and CD work better with a team; bring everyone on board easily.
• The largest resource classes on Docker, Linux, and Windows so you can choose the right compute for any job.
• The fastest CI anywhere. CircleCI beats leading competitors hands down in speed tests.
• Acceleration. Fine-tune your pipelines with caching, concurrency, test splitting, and more to increase your team's rate of quality software delivery.
• Streamlined collaboration with private orbs, shareable CircleCI configuration packages.
• Pipeline performance and health metrics on your Insights dashboard. See real-time data on credit usage, success rates, flaky test detection, pipeline duration, and more.
• Security. Our top priority is protecting our users' intellectual property and sensitive secrets such as keys, tokens, and credentials. Rest easy with a suite of security features and compliance certifications, including FedRAMP and SOC2.
  

"CircleCI's expanded free tier will increase the features and functionality available to community users. These new resources are intended to enable developer teams to set up their deployment systems more efficiently and with greater ease. By removing friction and improving the developer experience, CircleCI is working to help developers spend more time innovating and creating quality software," said Rachel Stephens, Senior Analyst, RedMonk.

More than 200,000 teams rely on CircleCI to shorten the distance between idea and delivery through software, including those at leading companies like Peloton, Samsung, and healthcare communications platform, Klara.

 "Testing, validation, and confidence in our code are key. We need the power of the cloud to deliver at scale. CircleCI connects our processes and pipelines and brings visibility into our coding environment, offering efficiency and rapid, high performance," said Valentin Ranshakov, QA Lead, Klara.

In addition to the most comprehensive usage package on the market, CircleCI customers also get access to all the benefits of being part of the CircleCI community, like technical support, training for teams, and extensive educational resources.

"CircleCI has delivered on its mission to help software engineering teams deliver faster again and again, with today being no exception. CircleCI's new Free plan marks a huge milestone for development teams across the globe, especially as the need and market value for automation drivers like continuous integration and delivery grow," Hector Aguilar, former President of Technology at Okta. 

"DevOps is an industry that we anticipate will grow exponentially as more businesses across all industries become software-first. An essential part of DevOps, CircleCI's CI/CD platform enables teams to quickly release trusted code by automating the build, test and delivery process," said Jai Das, President, Co-founder and Partner at Sapphire. "Once again, CircleCI has set itself apart as a leader in CI/CD by helping software teams automate low impact work, scale with parallel execution and support for containerized environments, and reduce the complexity and guesswork involved with managing cloud or on-prem environments-- all for free."

Sign up for a free CircleCI account today.