Bill Gates was quoted as saying:

“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”

The DevOps movement over the last few years seems to be strong empirical evidence for that statement — and the numbers seem to support it, too. An Enterprise Management Associates research report indicates that companies in which Continuous Delivery frequency increased by 10% or more were 2.5 times more likely to experience double-digit (≥10%) revenue. 

It's safe to say that there are compelling reasons to do your homework on automation. Maximizing efficiency and shortening the feedback loop are vital to creating and maintaining a competitive edge. To help you get started, here is our list of 21 automated deployment tools you should know.

1. Jenkins

One of the leading Continuous Delivery (CD) and Continuous Integration (CI) tools on the market, Jenkins is an automation server with a high-level of extensibility and a large community of users. Jenkins forked from Oracle’s Hudson-CI in 2011 during a time when there were some public differences of opinion expressed amongst members of the developer community and Oracle.

2. ElectricFlow

ElectricFlow is a release automation tool that offers a free community edition you can run on VirtualBox. ElecticFlow supports a number of plugins and Groovy-based DSL, CLI, APIs.

3. Microsoft Visual Studio

One of the cornerstones of Microsoft’s DevOps offerings is Visual Studio. Visual Studio allows users to define release definitions, run automation, track releases, and more.

4. Octopus Deploy

Octopus Deploy is built with the intent of automating deployment for .NET applications. You can install Octopus Deploy on a server or host an instance in Azure.

5. IBM UrbanCode

Purchased by IBM in 2013, UrbanCode automates the deployment to on-premise or cloud environments.

6. AWS CodeDeploy

Amazon’s automated deployment tool, CodeDeploy, boasts an impressive list of featured customers and platform and language agnosticism.

7. DeployBot

DeployBot connects with any Git repository and allows for manual or automatic deployments to multiple environments. DeployBot offers a myriad of integrations including the ability to deploy through Slack. 

8. Shippable

Shippable defines their own “pillars of DevOps” and their CI platform runs builds on Docker-based containers called minions.

9. TeamCity

TeamCity is a CI server from Jet Brains. TeamCity comes with smart configuration features and has official Docker images for servers and agents.

10. Bamboo

Bamboo Server is the CI offering from the people at Atlassian, the makers of Jira and Confluence. Bamboo advertises “integrations that matter” and offers a “small teams” package that donates proceeds to the Room to Read charity.

11. Codar

Codar is a continuous deployment solution from HP. Deployments are triggered using Jenkins.

12. CircleCI

CircleCI is a CI solution that puts an emphasis on its flexibility, reliability, and speed. CircleCI offers solutions from source to build to deploy and supports a variety of languages and applications.

13. Gradle

Gradle is a build tool used by some of the biggest names in the industry like LinkedIn, Netflix, and Adobe. Gradle uses Groovy build scripts, build-by-convention frameworks, and considers its build tool to be a general purpose tool along the same lines as Apache’s Ant.

14. Automic

Automic seeks to apply DevOps principles to some of the back-end apps allowing them to benefit from the same practices that many front-end web-based apps have over the past few years.

15. Distelli

Distelli specializes in deploying Kubernetes Clusters anywhere but can be used with any cloud or physical server. According to this TechCrunch article, Distelli secured $2.8 million in Series A funding in December 2015 and was founded by former AWS employee Rahul Singh.

16. XL Deploy

XL Deploy is an application release automation tool from XebiaLabs that supports a variety of plugins and environments and uses an agentless architecture.

17. Codeship

Codeship is a hosted CI solution that supports customization through native Docker support.   

18. GoCD

A CD server with an emphasis on visualizing workflows, GoCD is an open-source project sponsored by ThoughtWorks, Inc.

19. Capistrano

Capistrano is an open-source deployment tool programmed in Ruby. The documentation for Capistrano boasts its scriptability and “sane, expressive API."

20. Travis CI

Travis CI can be synced to your GitHub account and allows for automated testing and deployment. Travis CI is free for open-source projects.

21. BuildBot

BuildBot is an open-source Python-based CI framework that describes itself as “framework with batteries included.” BuildBot is geared towards use cases where canned solutions just are not flexible enough.