How to choose between Hudson and Jenkins? [closed]

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:

• 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.