charity: water finds Semaphore to be the perfect balance of speed, stability, and an elegant UI
😔 Before Semaphore:
- ⛔️️ Intermittent failures and instability of the CI/CD cycle
- ⛔️ 1+ hour CI/CD runtime
😄 After adopting Semaphore:
- ✅ Solid and stable performance of the CI/CD cycle
- ✅ 8 minutes CI/CD runtime
Discover what Semaphore can do for your team 🧑💻
The Challenge
The test suite for charity: water’s biggest application is large, so when making bigger changes to the codebase, pushing to CI is a must to validate that everything is working.
While using a competitor’s solution the team started having intermittent failures that were beyond their control. It seemed that was due to their current CI/CD tool provider’s instability with VM images.
“We haven’t had to reach out to Semaphore CI’s support too often (it just works) but when we have it has been responsive and delightful.”

Tristan O’Neil, Full Stack Developer at charity: water
The Solution
While testing other solutions the engineering team at charity: water found out that Semaphore has been extremely solid. They can always trust that when something in their CI pipeline is not working it’s something they did wrong.
Additionally, they’ve found Semaphore CI boxes to be extremely performant, which allowed them to parallelize the test suite on a single box as well as across boxes.
They also value the simplicity that Semaphore provides both in its clean UI and the solid and versatile platform images that are constantly being updated and maintained.
“There are many CI platforms to choose from but I think Semaphore has really struck the perfect balance of speed, stability, and an elegant UI. It’s easy to say that one CI platform is better than another on paper but we have used Semaphore for the past few years and it has continued to meet and exceed expectations. Semaphore is rock solid.”

Tristan O’Neil, Full Stack Developer at charity: water
The Results
The test suite of their largest application would take 1+ hour to run with a single RSpec process locally but thanks to Semaphore they’ve been able to cut that runtime down to about 8 minutes.
Charity: water is a non-profit organization bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in developing countries. Its engineering team focuses both on the public-facing fundraising platform behind charitywater.org and on internal tools that facilitate meeting the donor promise of reporting on every dollar raised.
www.charitywater.org
Industry
Non-profit
Stack
Ruby on Rails
Sinatra
Sidekiq
Postgres
React
More customer stories
“It’s way faster and we just pay Semaphore for the number of build seconds we actually use. As we’ve spent a bit of time optimizing our build speed, each build costs about 10 cents.”

Conrad Irwin
CTO / Co-Founder
“Semaphore allows us to build anywhere from two to twenty branches in parallel, each one in a threaded environment. We had thousands of tests that were running for a really long time and with Semaphore we got the build to run in under 20 minutes.”

Artem Lypiy
QA Lead at 500px
“We were using Jenkins to build the old system, and it was hard to maintain and quite painful. We looked at other hosted CI services, but they were very unreliable. When we found Semaphore, we got our application up and running pretty quickly. We now use it for all projects.”

Lukas Oberhuber
CTO at Simply Business