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A CI/CD platform is good at what it does: it builds, tests, and ships your code through pipelines, and often bundles source control, boards, and artifact registries. It is strong at the mechanics of delivery, and most teams already run one. Keep it. IntegraCI sits in a different place. It is the governance and internal-developer-platform layer across the whole SDLC, and it does not replace your CI: your runners still execute the builds, while IntegraCI orchestrates and gates them, and adds golden paths, policy gates, database-enforced tenant isolation, a tamper-evident audit trail, compliance policy bundles, and a governed AI gateway. You connect the CI, scanners, and clouds you already run, and the platform governs them.
Side by side
Both help your team standardise delivery. The difference is the job: a CI/CD platform runs the pipelines that build and ship your code, while IntegraCI is the layer that gates and governs what ships on top of the CI you already run. The table below shows where each one operates.
| Dimension | A CI/CD platform | IntegraCI |
|---|---|---|
| Centre of gravity | Running pipelines. A platform that builds, tests, and ships your code, often bundling source control, boards, and artifact registries around it. | Governance and the developer platform. Policy, audit, and tenant isolation sit at the centre, with delivery as one of the things they gate across the whole SDLC. |
| Security gates | Scan steps run as pipeline stages. Whether a failing scan actually blocks a release is a convention you wire and maintain in pipeline config. | Security scans run in the pipeline and a build that breaks policy is blocked before it promotes. The gate is part of the platform, not a step you remember to add. |
| AI in the workflow | Pipelines are the product. AI assistance, if used, comes from tools you bring and govern yourself, outside the pipeline. | AI is native and governed: a single AI gateway, human-in-the-loop approvals, and policy gates on every agent action, so automation stays inside your rules. |
| Governance & compliance | Pipeline logs and run history record what happened. Broader compliance evidence and a tamper-evident trail are things you assemble around it. | Policy lives as code, the audit trail is tamper-evident and exportable, and compliance policy bundles ship for common frameworks (policy bundles, not certification). |
| Connectors | Strong inside its own ecosystem, with plugins and integrations that extend the pipeline you run on it. | You connect your own: a broad library of connectors to the CI, scanners, and clouds you already run. IntegraCI governs them rather than replacing them. |
| Multi-tenancy | Organised around projects, groups, and pipeline permissions in your own setup, with isolation handled at the application layer. | Database-enforced tenant isolation out of the box. Database-enforced row-level security keeps tenants apart on its own, so there is no app-layer filtering to trust. |
| Hosting & licensing | A pipeline platform you adopt and run within its model, hosted or self-managed depending on the offering. | Self-hostable to air-gapped infrastructure, or managed. A guided evaluation to begin, self-hosted to air-gapped or managed. |
"A CI/CD platform" here means the category of CI/CD and DevOps platforms in general, not any one product. This comparison reflects a difference in scope (running pipelines versus governing what ships), and the two are complementary: your runners execute the builds, and IntegraCI gates and governs them.
The governance layer, in practice
A pipeline moves a build forward. Governance decides whether it should, records it, and keeps it inside policy. These are the controls IntegraCI keeps at the centre of every run, without replacing your runners.
Your scans run in the pipeline and a build that breaks policy stops before it promotes. The decision to ship is enforced, not advisory.
A single AI gateway, human-in-the-loop approvals, and policy gates on each agent action keep automation inside the rules you set.
A tamper-evident audit trail and exportable compliance evidence, so the day the auditor asks, you can prove what the platform did.
An honest fit check
A CI/CD platform and IntegraCI solve different problems, and most teams will run both. It comes down to whether your sharpest need is a pipeline to build and ship code, or a governance layer that gates and audits what ships across how you deliver.
Request a demo and run policy gates, governed AI, and a tamper-evident audit trail over the pipelines and tools you already use. Or talk to us about a self-hosted rollout.