TeamCity doesn't handle downstream builds properly. Bamboo has severe stability problems. I've worked at places that evaluated them and always found Jenkins was still the least bad option.
We had the problem that whenever we built a project it would trigger builds of any project that transitively depended on that module. So if you have e.g. 26 projects depending on each other in a line and you make a change to the first one, in jenkins this will run 26 builds as it builds A, then B, then C, .... . Whereas in Teamcity it will run 26 + 25 + 24 + ... builds: it'll build A, then B-Z immediately, then the build of B will trigger another build of C-Z, then the build of C will trigger a rebuild of D-Z and so on.
It sounds like those builds weren’t quite set up correctly. I’ve used TeamCity’s build chains quite a bit and haven’t seen this behavior. Depending on exactly how the builds are triggered it will sometimes enqueue redundant builds, but as the duplicates come to the top of the queue the server realizes they’re unnecessary and doesn’t run them.
There was no "TeamCity build chain", just normal maven dependencies. We raised the issue with their official support (we had a commercial contract) and they couldn't fix it either. Whereas Jenkins did the right thing by default. Shrug.
