Buildkite Reviews

I use Buildkite on our CI/CD tool to build and deploy our services. Over the past few years, I’ve noticed that the build times have reduced due to the implementation of some testing features. The main issues we encounter are related to CI/CD.

They have great plugins, scalability, UI, and pipeline options. They also offer webhooks that allow integration with custom setups to send events dynamically.

BuildKite should follow some providers like GitHub Actions. They can offer a shared agent or cloud agent. If you have some builds that don't require a private environment or support data, you can use their shared data.

For example, with Buildkite, I can use self-hosted agents running on my infrastructure and public shared agents. I will pay for the production minutes used as the production agent. For instance, if my job runs for ten minutes, I will be charged for ten minutes of usage.

I have been using Buildkite since 2022-2023.

In 2022, we extensively used Buildkite to manage around four hundred pipelines. However, we encountered some degradation in service quality at times, affecting our workflow and directly impacting our organizational processes. We considered reaching out to Buildkite support to address these challenges.

The initial setup is easy because of CRM and documentation. They have profile documentation to create agents and group teams.

The pricing depends on your use case. We're using the free tier. However, for paid plans, we were paying about ten dollars per user. It tracks user activity for billing purposes. If a user wasn't active during the month, we didn't pay for that user.

I can advise you on Buildkite. It's a good tool with some new features that are related to existing ones. They have integrated some existing features effectively.

It's very simple to learn and use authentication. It should be the central tool for all.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I use the solution in my company to merge the codes. When somebody needs more pipelines, the tool will take that person through the setup steps, like testing the unit and CI/CD pipelines. We make some workflows, and we can track which step one can state will fail, which may be in the migration process, database migration, or when unit testing fails. We mostly use the tool for different projects; for each project, we have a different pipeline, most of which is for unit testing. With Buildkite, users can do code coverage tests as well. Suppose somebody makes changes in the code, and if there were no test cases for those, we set the minimum pass level differently for different projects. For critical ones, we also have 95 percent code coverage, and if that is not covered, the build will fail, and that code will not be deployed with the server. The tool is used for the CI/CD pipeline from merging the code. After merging the codes, it will be triggered, and all the deployments can be tracked from a center.

Mostly, my company uses AWS CodeStar as the pipeline. Using Buildkite, I think we found it easy to integrate and follow the steps associated with the product. It is also easy to track separate projects or individual projects easily.

My company has had problems with the tool's parallel running and execution time. The testing framework also has some limitations. The tool cannot do everything.

I have been using Buildkite for three years. I am a user of the tool.

It is a stable solution. It did not have any issues during our project.

Our team has lots of people, but they are on different projects. For each project, there are different permissions and rules. In the core team, I work in a different role in the company, but there are different roles that focus only on the deployment, DevOps, and the core team. All the developers will use the tool and make changes in the Buildkite pipeline, but those are mostly the users. Altogether, there are more than 150 users of the tool.

It is a scalable tool.

While implementing the product, everything was clear from the tool's documents. There were no issues with the tool.

The problem we are facing sometimes is that we have lots of unit testers, and we have to wait about ten minutes to complete all of those because we want to run or find a way. It's not directly due to the limitation of the tool as well, but when we are running the spec, we want to run those parallelly and decrease the downtime so that our deployment can be faster. I think that one is not possible only due to the it also depends upon the unit test framework as well we are using. When we tried with the multiple test cases in a parallel manner, there were some dependencies, and one over another kept failing. We make those sequential calls. The aforementioned area consists of the issues my company faced while using Buildkite.

The product's initial setup phase was easy.

The solution is deployed on AWS Cloud.

I don't think the tool is expensive. I don't know the exact price of the tool, but if it was costly, my company would have stopped it because we switched to Splunk previously due to pricing reasons. Some other tools were also switched with other products, so I don't think billing was easy for us.

My company started to use Buildkite after we started having some issues with AWS CodeStar and AWS pipeline projects. We wanted a stable and easy product to use, and that is when we got to know about Buildkite based on some research work.

I recommend the product to those who plan to use it instead of some other pipelines, like Jenkins or AWS CodeStar.

I don't know if the product's machine-learning capabilities were used.

I think it's not difficult to use the tool because Buildkite is easy to follow since it is only the pipeline part. You can just run the shell script as you want and define the different steps. You can just define which commit, which branch, what the message is, and all the other things that are supported to run in the workflow can be defined in the pipeline. If you know about shell scripts, you can start with those pipelines and deal with config, as there are some samples as well.

I rate the tool as an eight and a half to nine out of ten.

I use Buildkite for deployment tasks related to building AMI images and deploying routing profile queues into Amazon Connect. This involves using Buildkite in conjunction with GitHub. We create files, raise pull requests in GitHub, and then run the Buildkite pipeline for deployment tasks.

In Buildkite, I find it easy to manage the Buildkite pipeline with the ability to pull Buildkite IP directly to update security groups. The default upgrade is managed by Buildkite. We use version five integrated with Terraform. There is a team that assists with any significant issues, which adds to the reliability.

One area that needs improvement in Buildkite is the requirement for rework of the code. There can be syntax errors when running the Buildkite pipeline, especially if someone has made manual changes in AWS or Amazon Connect, which can cause the pipeline to stop.

I have been using Buildkite for two years.

We have faced multiple instances of syntax errors when running the Buildkite pipeline, especially when manual modifications have been made into AWS or Amazon Connect. While these issues occur, we rely on a dedicated team to manage and resolve significant issues.

The team managing Buildkite provides good support, and they handle significant issues that arise during operations.

Neutral

The initial setup is not something I witnessed directly as the pipeline was already in place when I joined. Therefore, I have no firsthand information about the initial setup process.

We are migrating our Buildkite pipeline to another tool, but I am not aware of why this decision was made. This migration capability is considered a pro.

With two years of experience on Buildkite, I would recommend it to others due to its manageable pipeline and the support team available for big issues. I am satisfied with it, rating its stability an eight out of ten. Overall, I rate Buildkite eight out of ten.

Most of our projects involve both front-end and back-end development. We write the code and then create a file to set up our process, including specifying the tests we want to run. Before deploying to production, we need to install and configure certain things. We need something like Docker Pro, but I'm unsure about that. I'm familiar with the steps for using Buildkite for this process. We start by defining which tests to run.

Once the tests are done, we can add a button to ensure the process doesn't proceed until the test is completed or until we manually press the button. We do this because we always have multiple stages of development, like dev, staging, and production. Once the code is deployed, we test it on dev and then press the button to move it to the stage for QA testing. After QA, we press the button again to deploy to production.

If you join our team, it's very easy to learn Buildkite. We have our own boilerplate, so you can just clone it and add your configuration steps. Plus, we have documentation available to guide you through the process.

I have been using the product for two years. 

Sometimes, the system breaks down when we have limited instances running. For example, our company is very large, and some share the Buildkite instances. If we expect to deploy to production on a Friday, but every team is also deploying on Friday, we might have around twenty projects using Buildkite simultaneously.

My company has 1000-2000 users. The solution is scalable. However, we are careful so as not to overspend. 

The solution is worth its cost if you are a large organization. It is flexible and easy to use. 

I haven't used any other CI/CD platform before this, except for GitLab CI/CD, which I only used at a surface level. We would write some build steps and deploy them as soon as the tests were done. I'm unsure if GitLab has the same capabilities as Buildkite, particularly the step configuration feature that allows you to customize and control the move from one stage to the next (dev to staging, staging to production). I find this feature in Buildkite very easy to integrate and use.

If you're considering using the solution for the first time, I suggest starting with GitLab CI/CD or GitHub Actions. Buildkite might be overkill for smaller projects or individual use. It's usually more expensive for new users but can be cost-effective for large-scale organizations. 

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten. 

The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that we could self-host Buildkite agents, and we could run them on our own AWS instances.

I am not really sure at this stage if it can be improved in any way because I haven't been using it for six months. I am sure that there would have been a lot of improvements made to the tool already since I last used it. As far as I can remember, there wasn't much that I wasn't able to do in the tool.

To make the tool auto-scalable, you need to use Kubernetes. It gets very complex if you want the tool to scale automatically. If you do manual scaling according to the demand, I think it is not too hard. Auto-scalability is an area of concern that needs improvement.

I have used Buildkite for almost two years. I am no longer working at the company now, so I am not using it anymore because I am not doing the job at this stage. My company was a customer of the tool.

Only minor issues with the tool's stability were resolved. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. If you use the self-hosting option, you can always scale up and scale down as you want.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

My company had around 200 pipelines, but more than 3,000 jobs were running every day with the tool.

The solution can be considered as a very well-polished platform with a really great UI. Knowledge-wise, when it comes to response time, the technical team was at the top. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

I know a lot of companies use Jenkins, GitLab, and GitHub CI, and all of them are good, but they cannot beat Buildkite's UI, ease of use, and developer-friendly features.

I have seen an ROI.

The self-hosted option is pretty cheap. My company had a really great deal with Buildkite because we started with them really early on when they had started off in the market and were a much smaller organization. I remember how the tool changed its pricing model in the end, but it was still a very good price.

I was working as a DevOps engineer at my last job. It was a startup that helps big companies aggregate their marketing data. The tool also helps generate incremental marketing campaigns, so you know what your customer do and can identify marketing opportunities based on it. My company used to provide a singular view from multiple marketing channels, such as offline, online, Facebook ads, Instagram, or HubSpot. My role at the company was as a DevOps engineer, and we were using Buildkite as our CI/CD platform. I haven't really used a lot of Buildkite agents apart from GitLab CI and GitHub CI. 

When I started off with the tool, everything was already set up in my previous company. The thing that I like the most about the tool is that it has a really good UI that is very easy to navigate. There are pipelines in the tool, and you can create dynamic pipelines. Based on certain conditions in the script, the pipeline will change, which I think was a very unique feature.

My company used to use the self- hosted option, which is a little bit complicated. I would still say it's not as complicated as its competitors like Salesforce.

I haven't got a chance to use the tool's AI capabilities.

Buildkite could be used as a tool to collaborate with other teams because it has such a great UI. You can always build your pipelines in a way that other teams can understand, and I think that it is the most useful thing about Buildkite because even non-technical people can understand it. Since the tool has a great UI, you can build your pipelines in a way that allows other teams to have a look at it at any time, and they will be able to be in the process and understand what is happening in the background.

I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

We use the solution to build our continuous integration pipeline. When we raise a PR, we run test cases through it.

It is easy to integrate the solution with AWS or Google Cloud Platform. The documentation is quite helpful. The vendor has invested their time into it, and it is easy to go through it. The product logs everything. It has been very easy to trace the failures. The APIs make fetching all the build details from the logs easy.

The solution saves a lot of time running all the pipelines and test cases in one place. It also saves resources. We do not have to dig deep for changes. It saves resource time and deployment time. We deploy a product to production twice every day.

Integrating the solution with other chat applications like Google Chat or Hangouts is difficult. We had to use a third-party integration tool or webhooks to work around it. The product must provide better integration with other tools. It must notify us whether the build has been a success or not.

I have been using the solution for two years.

The tool is pretty stable. We rarely see downtime.

The tool is scalable. We run seven to eight pipelines in one location. The scalability helps us integrate the code, make decisions quickly, and deploy changes. We have six users in our organization.

I contacted support a few times. I got answers pretty quickly. I rate the support eight and a half to nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was easy since we had the documentation. We use the SaaS version. Our build was large. The deployment took 20 to 30 minutes. The process is automated. We didn't need any engineer for the deployment. We had to look into things to see if there was some failure. We have three people on our technical team. It is easy to maintain the tool. Our builds run on Amazon EC2 instances. If it changes, we need to update Buildkite.

We paid a subscription fee for the product.

I will recommend the product to others. It is easy to integrate. Overall, I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

Since Docker requires building images to run containers, we use Buildkite.

What I like best about Buildkite is its workflow management. You define YAML files to specify what needs to be done. The jobs can run based on a schedule, like a cron job, where you set it to run every night or every week. Additionally, you can set up triggers, such as new pushes to a repository.

It's quite similar to GitHub workflows. The main difference is cost, and Buildkite has some clever features for caching the build process for Docker containers. Docker containers are built-in layers, and code changes don't always mean you need to rebuild all layers. The tool can cache these layers intelligently and only rebuild the parts that need to be updated.

The way Buildkite represents workflows can be challenging. It uses Directed Acyclic Graphs, and there's a trade-off between abstraction and understanding what goes wrong when something fails. When a layer of jobs breaks down, it can be difficult to identify the issue at first glance. Additionally, logging can be cumbersome. I prefer GitHub Workflows.

I've been using Buildkite for about a year.

We never had any issues with stability. 

I have not seen any issues with scalability. You can run either one job or a million jobs. 

I have never contacted the tool's support team. It has good documentation. 

The tool's initial setup and implementation can be difficult. We had multiple teams struggle with it. There are two main reasons for this. First, the abstraction level using YAML can make debugging challenging. Second, DevOps and CI/CD practices are complex for many people.

Buildkite is known to be cheaper than GitHub Workflows, which is considered a standard in the industry. It can be cost-effective, especially for organizations that heavily utilize Docker and containerization, because every code change triggers a new build. Its integration with AWS, particularly with ECR, and its caching capabilities with layers are powerful features.

If you're looking for a product to handle CI/CD workflows, I would rate Buildkite around seven out of ten. I would recommend it to others, depending on their use case. It's a great tool for SRE or DevOps teams, especially in larger organizations with multiple developers and teams continuously producing and changing code.

If you need a platform to separate your repositories and want a more dedicated approach, Buildkite is a choice.

I work with Solenopsis, a Salesforce test automation tool. We integrate with various tools depending on the customer's requirements. 

If a customer uses Buildkite, we demonstrate how it integrates with Solenopsis for their CI/CD pipelines. The same applies to other tools like TeamCity and BuildGuard. I've used these tools to meet specific customer needs.

So, it's mainly used for automated pipelines. For the CI/CD side. It may have other features, but I've only explored it for this purpose.

It runs test execution and other tasks within Docker containers. It utilizes Docker internally.

The best thing isn't specific to Buildkite. Most tools offer similar features: they're cloud-based, making them easy to use; you have your own private space to work; and the UI is user-friendly. 

Buildkite's UI is particularly intuitive, making it simple to add steps to your pipeline. It also provides detailed logging.

Compared to market leaders like Azure DevOps and Jenkins, Buildkite's community is smaller, but they do have some documentation.

In terms of stability, I didn't notice any bugs. My test executions ran smoothly. I'm not sure how well it handles lengthy applications, like eight or nine hours long, as I don't have that data. Otherwise, I didn't see any issues.

Buildkite isn't as widely used as Azure DevOps. I only used it for two customers.

I didn't need a technical support team. The information I needed was readily available on the web. The UI is easy to understand.

Buildkite itself is a cloud-based solution. I created a pipeline in one of my repositories for a project. The project is fetched from Git, and a pipeline is built around it for test execution. That's how I used Buildkite.

I haven't used Buildkite for application deployment. I used Buildkite to run my test execution.  My customer used Buildkite and wanted to run tests on their hosted agents, which are similar to Docker containers. Most tools offer this functionality, like Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, and Bitbucket. 

Buildkite's UI is better than some others, but I mainly used it to trigger test execution and build automation on their hosted agents.

I suggest exploring other options as well, as your requirements might be met by another product. I'm not sure about their licensing costs since I used it for customers who already had it. 

My tasks weren't complex, and Buildkite's UI made it easy. My advice is to analyze your requirements, determine how you want to use Buildkite, and compare it with other products on the market. It's possible that its licensing cost is higher than others.

It is easy to learn Buildkite. 

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. I was able to achieve what I needed, and the documentation was helpful. My requirements weren't complex. I can't give it a higher rating because I don't know enough about its community or market presence. Feature-wise, it was good enough for me.

We use it as our main CI/CD platform. Our platform was a microservice blockchain platform, and we used the solution to build our microservices and deployment.

When I started three and a half years ago, Buildkite wasn't as mature as it is today. When we first started, we had to implement many of the features that Buildkite now provides out of the box. We build our own scalable agents in Kubernetes. Buildkite now has the Kubernetes stack with built-in scalability and so on.

We eventually migrated to those features, but we had to implement many of them manually in the first place. The tool's flexibility with pipelines gave us a lot of advantages, especially when managing a huge amount of microservices.

Buildkite has been pushing a lot of effort toward the plugin marketplace and plugin users, especially with the Kubernetes plugin that supports the scalability of agents. The flexibility of some plugins is somewhat limited. In the past, I used to modify the plugins according to my needs. Now, plugins support some sort of configuration or reconfiguration. I would love to see some features added in that direction and the plugin's use.

I would like to see some improvements in the hooks implementation. The hooks are amazing and give me a lot of extra flexibility in many of the pipelines, but they're still limited in some areas.

I've used Buildkite extensively in my previous job for about three and a half years.

We occasionally encounter bugs in the solution, but not many. We used to have a channel that reported Buildkite outages.

Scalability is one of Buildkite's best features, given its whole model of building your own agents and how it handles agent administration and agent lifecycle.

The solution's initial setup depends on the platform. Since I was using Kubernetes, I would say the initial setup was not very easy. That's not a limitation of Buildkite, but it is probably more related to Kubernetes. If I were just to discuss the setup with the agents, I would say the setup would be average.

Buildkite is worth the money for huge enterprises with a big enough DevOps team or operation team to handle agent management.

The solution's price model is per-user based. Since you're building your own agents, you only have to pay for the SaaS subscription, which is the user model. The solution's per-user pricing model suits huge enterprises but is expensive for small to medium businesses.

Buildkite is an easy-to-use tool. As a SaaS platform, managing agents is straightforward with the solution. Since it's a combination of pipeline and templating, some knowledge is required. However, Buildkite's documentation is really good.

The dependency between the steps is really good with failures in Buildkite. The agent's registration is a lot better now with the new stack. It wasn't so before because we had to do all this manually, and failures were harder to track. I think it's better now with the new stack. I haven't tried it extensively with the new stack, but I think it's a lot better. The dependencies and the metrics between the steps in Buildkite are quite flexible.

I would recommend the solution to other users. From a technical perspective, the flexibility of bringing your own agents is a huge advantage. From the business aspect, you don't have to worry about managing your masters. This is a huge concern for DevOps engineers using other platforms like Jenkins or Travis.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I use the solution in my company to create CI/CD pipelines to handle all the services and to automate the deployment process.

Previously, my company had tried Jenkins with which we had a lot of issues since the nodes kept on crashing, making everything very slow. With Buildkite, the UI is good, but we recently moved to Monorepos, so all our service codes will be in one report. Buildkite helps manage the sessions in Monorepos.

My company uses automated scale-up and scale-down for the agents in Buildkite. Most of the time, there are on-demand agents, and it takes a longer time for an agent to kick in. All Buildkite agents run on an AWS agent, so we enable autoscaling for it. Based on the load, the agents can be scaled up and scaled down, and while they are scaling up, sometimes they just get stuck. Until the nodes don't come up, Buildkite won't run on them. The major issue has to do with the tool's scalability, especially when increasing the number of agents.

Until now, as a CI/CD tool, we have been using Buildkite, and we haven't faced any issues or gaps in it.

I have been using Buildkite for a year. I am a user of the solution.

It is a stable solution.

My company has around 80 to 100 users of the product. Users are mostly less than ten people at a time.

As the services grow, the agents in Buildkite will keep growing.

I didn't mention the solution's technical support, as most of it is covered in its documentation. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

Previously, my company used Jenkins.

The product's deployment phase is easier than that of Jenkins. With Jenkins, one needs to use its specific GUI language. In Buildkite, you have the flexibility to use any language.

If users use AWS or EC2 in their companies, the tool can be deployed on Buildkite's cloud services.

The product has been worth our company's investment.

Based on my company's evaluations, Buildkite is cheaper than Azure Harness but clearer than Azure Pipelines.

For a business plan, it was 19 USD per month per user.

My company has evaluated other tools, such as GitHub Actions against Buildkite. My company has evaluated other tools, such as GitHub Actions against Buildkite.

During our company's evaluation process, we had considered multiple CI/CD tools , after which we came to Azure Pipelines, Harness and Buildkite. In Azure Pipelines, there is an extra cost of parallel CI/CD pipelines, but in Buildkite, there is no such extra cost.

I recommend the product to others who plan to use it. If you use some CI/CD tools like Jenkins, GitLab, or GitHub, then there is no need to get some training in Buildkite. One can start off with Buildkite's documentation, and I feel it would be a very good starting point.

Buildkite has impacted our company's software delivery speed and cost significantly after we moved from Jenkins though there is not much of a difference, but Buildkite is a bit quicker. The ease of use of Buildkite is better than that of Jenkins. Buildkite's UI and Ux are better than Jenkins.

My company does not have any machine learning projects at the moment.

I have not seen any downtime with the tool.

I rate the tool as an eight to nine out of ten.