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?
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.
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.
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:
, then I would suggest Hudson.
Conversely, if you prefer:
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
