An Appcircle alternative for the last step of your pipeline

BetaDrop vs Appcircle

Appcircle figures are transcribed from their own pages in August 2026: Starter limits and the Corporate plan's "Tailored" pricing from appcircle.io/pricing, the testing-group model from their distribution docs. Where they publish no number, the row says so instead of guessing. Both products change, so check theirs before deciding on figures alone.

What Appcircle's free Starter plan covers

Appcircle lists Starter as always free and meters it per module: 1 concurrent build, 30 minutes of build time per build, 20 builds per month, 100 Testing Distribution downloads per month, 100 Enterprise App Store downloads per month, 5 publishes to stores per month, and 1000 CodePush updates per month. Those are their published figures, checked in August 2026.

For distribution, the download counter runs out first. Ten testers on a weekly build is forty installs before anyone reinstalls after a crash, and the counter is shared across every tester and every build that month.

BetaDrop meters different things. A build can be up to 500 MB free and 1 GB on Studio, and installs aren't counted: the monthly bandwidth allowance covers hosted static sites, not build downloads. What you meet instead is total storage, 1 GB of it on the free tier, and the clock.

The expiry picker starts at 3 days, a free account can stretch one build to 7 days, and an upload made without signing in lasts 24 hours. Paid plans hold a dated expiry as far out as a year on Pro and 10 years on Studio.

Our prices are printed on the BetaDrop pricing page. Appcircle's Corporate plan is quoted per module on an annual licence, so what you'd actually pay isn't something either of us can put on a page.

Where Appcircle is the right call

Appcircle is a full mobile DevOps platform: build pipelines, signing management, store submission, an enterprise app store. If you want CI, signing and distribution from one vendor on one contract, that's a real product category and BetaDrop only does the distribution half. Nothing further down this page changes that.

• You have no CI yet. Their build machines, workflow marketplace and signing vault are the product; BetaDrop assumes a green build already exists somewhere.
• You need on-premises or private-cloud deployment, SSO or LDAP, or multi-tenancy. Those sit on the Corporate plan. BetaDrop is hosted and has no self-hosted edition.
• Ad hoc signing is your bottleneck. Appcircle registers device UDIDs and re-signs the binary so a newly added device installs without a rebuild. BetaDrop never touches your signature.
• You want an internal app store your staff browse, rather than a link per build.

Vocabulary for that third point, since it's where teams get stuck. Ad hoc distribution is Apple's term for a build signed against a fixed list of devices. The provisioning profile is the file inside the app naming those devices; a UDID is the identifier that puts one iPhone on the list. If a tester's UDID is missing, the install fails on any host, ours included. The UDID checker collects the identifiers, but re-signing afterwards is still your job here.

Keep the CI you have, change the last step

Most teams shopping for an Appcircle alternative aren't shopping for a build system. GitHub Actions compiles it, fastlane signs it, and the only unsolved step is putting the artifact in front of a human. Adopting a platform to get that step is a large answer to a small question.

1. Keep building exactly as you build now. Same runner, same fastlane lane, same signed artifact. No SDK to add, no re-release just to change where the file lands.
2. Swap the upload step. On GitHub Actions that's betadrop-app/upload-action@v1 with a token in BETADROP_TOKEN, written out in full on the GitHub Actions integration guide. On any other CI, install @betadrop/cli and publish from a shell step. Tokens come from Settings → Developer → API tokens.
3. Send the link. Slack, a pull request comment, an email, or a QR code on a screen. The link is the distribution unit, so there's no tester group to keep in sync and nobody to invite before they can install.

- name: Publish to BetaDrop
  uses: betadrop-app/upload-action@v1
  with:
    file: build/app/outputs/flutter-apk/app-release.apk
    token: ${{ secrets.BETADROP_TOKEN }}
    notes: ${{ github.event.head_commit.message }}

npm install -g @betadrop/cli
betadrop publish ./MyApp.ipa --ci   # prints only the install URL

Bitrise, GitLab CI, Jenkins and fastlane reduce to the same one-line publish step; the integrations directory has the copy-paste version for each.

What the tester actually does

They tap a URL and the app installs. On iOS the link hands Safari an itms-services manifest, the small XML file iOS needs before it will install anything from outside the App Store, and the icon appears on the home screen with a progress ring. On Android the browser downloads the .apk and the system installer asks once for permission. There's no review queue in the middle: the link works the moment the upload finishes, so the wait is your connection and nothing else.

Two things still bite, on any host. An ad hoc iOS build refuses to install on a device that isn't in its profile, and Android asks an unfamiliar tester to allow installs from that browser once. Both are operating-system behaviour, and a vendor promising to remove them is describing an enterprise certificate, not a feature.

The objection from a manager is usually different: why not email the file? That one is worked through on the page about sending a build to testers. Short version: an emailed .ipa won't install on an iPhone at all.

If you came here from App Center

Microsoft retired App Center on 31 March 2025 and Appcircle campaigned hard as the replacement. If you moved once already and are now weighing a second migration you didn't ask for, the useful question is which half of App Center you actually used. Build means you're shopping for a CI vendor, and this page isn't for you.

Distribute means you're shopping for a link, and a platform is a heavy way to buy one. The App Center alternative page has the retirement dates and what Microsoft recommended for each service.

Frequently asked questions