How to choose between Hudson and Jenkins? [closed]

Asked 11/2, 2011 at 20:58 Answered 30/8, 2011 at 19:37

455

It took me an hour or so to work out Hudson has only branched recently (Jan/2011)
I have no idea how rapid the change of each branch is now, but more importantly, what is the direction each branch is taking and what are key points so one could make a choice between which to go with?

Anybody have links to product roadmap and feature differences?

Hartz answered 11/2, 2011 at 20:58 Comment(16)

what did you end up selecting between Jenkins vs Hudson? – Beginner 21/3, 2011 at 15:22

@Beginner - no firm decision yet. We have a number of projects using different servers (not shareing). Most remain Hudson at the moment, some are switched to Jenkins. No particular difference for our purposes yet so no urgency to pick. – Hartz 22/3, 2011 at 1:20

@Beginner - I'm leaning toward Jenkins myself for future updates but I figure I'll wait until there is actually an update that I need so that I can defer the decision until later. I figure this way I can wait to see how it pans out. – Greyson 12/4, 2011 at 1:39

@Kev: I disagree, that this question is not constructive. It is not a debate like "x vs. y, which to prefer", but it is about a branch of Hudson, which is a very useful information. – Oppose 9/1, 2012 at 16:36

@Oppose - please feel free to bring this up on Meta Stack Overflow if you disagree. – Conyers 10/1, 2012 at 17:1

@Kev, no it is OK, I just voted for reopen ... – Oppose 10/1, 2012 at 18:8

Yeah, this thread needs to be reopened for more up to date answers. – Hypolimnion 9/9, 2013 at 17:47

@Hypolimnion There was already a follow-up question one year on: https://mcmap.net/q/81490/-hudson-vs-jenkins-in-2012-closed/234938 — and now, a further year later, the situation is still the same. – Pridemore 10/10, 2013 at 9:12

@tanascius: I think you should bring your concern up on meta. – Mastin 13/12, 2013 at 4:11

I understand the dangerous nature of that type of question, but it seems to me that (i) it has brought up some very interesting information, (ii) has not started any kind of dispute and (iii) is legitimate for it is not easy to choose without this kind of information – Peursem 13/5, 2014 at 12:23

Please reword the question to fit the rules!!! Seriously, it seems like the worthwhile questionable questions are usually the ones to get zotted. – Anderson 24/5, 2014 at 1:3

coderanch.com/t/622298/tools/Difference-Hudson-Jenkins – Anderson 24/5, 2014 at 1:6

Since this question was asked and answered, Oracle decided to hand Hudson over to the Eclipse foundation. See eclipse.org/hudson for details. As of 2016-10-03 it appears a bit stale, and the promised 3.4.0 minor release is now a month late. According to git.eclipse.org/c/hudson/org.eclipse.hudson.core.git/… there has been a total of 10 commits in core Hudson in the first half of 2016 and none after that. It appears for all practical purposes to have been abandoned. – Liquidize 3/10, 2016 at 15:1

"closed as not constructive", and yet this question got 403 upvotes... – Folse 24/1, 2017 at 9:10

This type of question belongs in softwarerecs.stackexchange.com – Strap 6/2, 2018 at 16:12

I disagree with Kev, this is indeed a very good question – Dip 12/5, 2018 at 11:1

509

Use Jenkins.

Jenkins is the recent fork by the core developers of Hudson. To understand why, you need to know the history of the project. It was originally open source and supported by Sun. Like much of what Sun did, it was fairly open, but there was a bit of benign neglect. The source, trackers, website, etc. were hosted by Sun on their relatively closed java.net platform.

Then Oracle bought Sun. For various reasons Oracle has not been shy about leveraging what it perceives as its assets. Those include some control over the logistic platform of Hudson, and particularly control over the Hudson name. Many users and contributors weren't comfortable with that and decided to leave.

So it comes down to what Hudson vs Jenkins offers. Both Oracle's Hudson and Jenkins have the code. Hudson has Oracle and Sonatype's corporate support and the brand. Jenkins has most of the core developers, the community, and (so far) much more actual work.

Read that post I linked up top, then read the rest of these in chronological order. For balance you can read the Hudson/Oracle take on it. It's pretty clear to me who is playing defensive and who has real intentions for the project.

Beginner answered 11/2, 2011 at 21:4 Comment(5)

"most of the people behind it" - this seems to be true of the project founders, but it should be noted that Sonotype (Maven inc) have committed themselves to the Hudson side of the divide, with a raft of architectural changes in the pipeline. Will be interesting to see if team Jenkins still have enough inovation up their sleeves to retain the developer/user mindshare – Odontograph 18/2, 2011 at 9:59

@magic: At least based on this brief comparison, a fortnight after the split, Jenkins is by far more active. In any case, while I'm with Jenkins, it's interesting to see what the Sonatype guys are up to. – Diaghilev 19/2, 2011 at 23:56

Here's another update by the person who wrote @Jonik's brief comparison. This one is ~2 months later. – Beginner 13/5, 2011 at 17:34

And now five years later, Jenkins is thriving, and Oracle has dumped Hudson on the Eclipse elephant graveyard where it is but in name abandoned. – Liquidize 14/10, 2016 at 13:52

And now Hudson is officially abandoned. – Hypoxia 30/11, 2021 at 20:30

118

As chmullig wrote, use Jenkins. Some additional points:

In fact, arguably it was Oracle who did the forking! And technically, too, that's kinda what happened.
It's interesting to see what comes out of "Hudson" though. While the "Winston summarizes the state and rosy future of the Hudson project" stuff they posted on the (new) Hudson website originally seemed like odd humour to me, perhaps this was a purposeful takeover, and the Sonatype guys actually have some big ideas up their sleeve. This analysis, suggesting a deliberate strategy by Oracle/Sonatype to oust Kohsuke and crew to create a more "enterprisy" Hudson is a very interesting read!
In any case, this brief comparison a fortnight after the split—while not exactly scientific—shows Jenkins to be by far more active of the two projects.

...and a little background info:

The creator of Hudson, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, started the project on his free time, even if he was working for Sun Microsystems and later paid by them to develop it further. As @erickson noted at another SO question,

[Hudson/Jenkins] is the product of a single genius intellect—Kohsuke Kawaguchi. Because of that, it's consistent, coherent, and rock solid.

After the acquisition by Oracle, Kohsuke didn't hang around for long (^{due to lack of monitors...? ;-]}), and went to work for CloudBees. What started in late 2010 as conflict over tools between the dev community and Oracle and ended in the rename/fork/split is well documented in the links chmullig provided. To me, that whole conundrum speaks, perhaps more than anything else, to Oracle's utter inability or unwillingness to sponsor an open-source project in a way that keeps all parties (Oracle, developers, users) happy. It's not in their DNA or something, as we've seen in other cases too.

Given all of the above, I would personally follow Kohsuke and other core developers in this matter, and go with Jenkins.

Diaghilev answered 19/2, 2011 at 23:47 Comment(0)

Just my take on the matter, three months later:

Jenkins has continued the path well-trodden by the original Hudson with frequent releases including many minor updates.

Oracle seems to have largely delegated work on the future path for Hudson to the Sonatype team, who has performed some significant changes, especially with respect to Maven. They have jointly moved it to the Eclipse foundation.

I would suggest that if you like the sound of:

less frequent releases but ones that are more heavily tested for backwards compatibility (more of an "enterprise-style" release cycle)
a product focused primarily on strong Maven and/or Nexus integration (i.e., you have no interest in Gradle and Artifactory etc)
professional support offerings from Sonatype or maybe Oracle in preference to Cloudbees etc
you don't mind having a smaller community of plugin developers etc.

, then I would suggest Hudson.

Conversely, if you prefer:

more frequent updates, even if they require a bit more frequent tweaking and are perhaps slightly riskier in terms of compatibility (more of a "latest and greatest" release cycle)
a system with more active community support for e.g., other build systems / artifact repositories
support offerings from the original creator et al. and/or you have no interest in professional support (e.g., you're happy as long as you can get a fix in next week's "latest and greatest")
a classical OSS-style witches' brew of a development ecosystem

then I would suggest Jenkins. (and as a commenter noted, Jenkins now also has "LTS" releases which are maintained on a more "stable" branch)

The conservative course would be to choose Hudson now and migrate to Jenkins if must-have features are unavailable. The dynamic course would be to choose Jenkins now and migrate to Hudson if chasing updates becomes too time-consuming to justify.

Dinh answered 11/5, 2011 at 21:24 Comment(1)

Or get the best of both worlds and use the new Jenkins Long-Term Support (LTS) releases! – Pridemore 8/9, 2011 at 20:43

Up front .. I am a Hudson committer and author of the Hudson book, but I was not involved in the whole split of the projects.

In any case here is my advice:

Check out both and see what fits your needs better.

Hudson is going to complete the migration to be a top level Eclipse projects later this year and has gotten a whole bunch of full time developers, QA and others working on the project. It is still going strong and has a lot of users and with being the default CI server at Eclipse it will continue to serve the needs of many Java developers. Looking at the roadmap and plans for the future you can see that after the Maven 3 integration accomplished with the 2.1.0 release a whole bunch of other interesting feature are ahead.

http://www.eclipse.org/hudson

Jenkins on the other side has won over many original Hudson users and has a large user community across multiple technologies and also has a whole bunch of developers working on it.

At this stage both CI servers are great tools to use and depending on your needs in terms of technology to integrate with one or the other might be better. Both products are available as open source and you can get commercial support from various companies for both.

In any case .. if you are not using a CI server yet.. start now with either of them and you will see huge benefits.

Update Jan 2013: After a long process of IP cleanup and further improvements Hudson 3.0 as the first Eclipse foundation approved release is now available.

Resentful answered 30/8, 2011 at 19:37 Comment(0)

Jenkins is the new Hudson. It really is more like a rename, not a fork, since the whole development community moved to Jenkins. (Oracle is left sitting in a corner holding their old ball "Hudson", but it's just a soul-less project now.)

C.f. Ethereal -> WireShark

Damages answered 11/2, 2011 at 21:4 Comment(6)

What do I have to do with my running Hudson Build server? I guess it will not automatically update to the new Jenkins fork/branch/rename. Do I have to setup the build server from scratch? – Poundal 11/2, 2011 at 21:24

You can "upgrade" to Jenkins just like you used to upgrade from one version of Hudson to another. – Fiducial 12/2, 2011 at 3:21

I am currently running Hudson 1.395. Currently it doesn't show my available updates. Is the update that makes the name change coming up later? – Poundal 14/2, 2011 at 8:32

No, Hudson (Oracle) won't[1] ever give an update to Jenkins; if Oracle were willing to work with the community there wouldn't have been a split in the first place. [1] Barring pigs flying, Mr. Ellison becoming your kind friendly neighbour, etc. – Damages 23/2, 2011 at 15:37

See here: wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/… for how to add Jenkins to Hudson's upgrade centre. – Roundlet 3/3, 2011 at 16:42

@NathanKidd +1 for "C.f. Ethereal -> WireShark". That really clarifies. Thanks – Ricotta 21/5, 2013 at 2:1

I've got two points to add. One, Hudson/Jenkins is all about the plugins. Plugin developers have moved to Jenkins and so should we, the users. Two, I am not personally a big fan of Oracle's products. In fact, I avoid them like the plague. For the money spent on licensing and hardware for an Oracle solution you can hire twice the engineering staff and still have some left over to buy beer every Friday :)

Electrophone answered 13/5, 2011 at 16:16 Comment(1)

Because of all the plugins one Jenkins can be quite different than the other, and also different from the next time you install it. – Miracle 21/1, 2014 at 5:59

From the Jenkins website, http://jenkins-ci.org, the following sums it up.

In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.

Oracle now owns the Hudson trademark, but has licensed it under the Eclipse EPL. Jenkins is on the MIT license. Both Hudson and Jenkins are open-source. Based on the combination of who you work for and personal preference for open-source, the decision is straightforward IMHO.

Hope this was helpful.

Abolish answered 4/6, 2011 at 21:3 Comment(3)

Hudson is a top level Eclipse project now. – Resentful 24/4, 2012 at 16:25

Oracle now owns hudson and Jenkins is open-source. Both are MIT Licensed. Describing one as open-source and the other as other-than-open-source is misleading. They're free software. – Cubage 16/5, 2012 at 19:7

Oracle apparently owns the Hudson name (as a trademark). – Liquidize 12/9, 2012 at 14:12

For those who have mentioned a reconciliation as a potential future for Hudson and Jenkins, with the fact that Jenkins will be joining SPI, it is unlikely at this point they will reconcile.

Carpous answered 15/6, 2011 at 19:10 Comment(0)

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