Bamboo vs Buildkite comparison

Read 14 Buildkite reviews

394 Views
394 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Bamboo

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

Bamboo and Buildkite compete in the CI/CD landscape, with Bamboo having an edge in integration capabilities and support for Atlassian products, making it appealing for Atlassian ecosystem users. Buildkite stands out with its ease of setup and cloud environment management, offering deployment flexibility and reduced infrastructure overhead.

Features: Bamboo integrates tightly with Atlassian tools like Jira and Bitbucket, supports automatic branching, and provides flexible configurations for custom build processes. It also supports projects across multiple environments. Buildkite offers effective YAML workflow management, efficient Docker caching, and seamless cloud integration, ideal for containerized environments.

Room for Improvement: Bamboo is noted for its complexity in tool configuration and plugin customization. Users seek better support for branched builds and API coverage. Buildkite could improve in workflow representation, chat app integration, and documentation for third-party support, which currently presents a learning curve for new users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Bamboo supports on-premises and hybrid cloud deployments, appealing to diverse infrastructure preferences, with varied user experiences in support responsiveness. Buildkite excels in public cloud deployment, easing manual infrastructure burden, with community resources and documentation aiding troubleshooting despite less direct support.

Pricing and ROI: Bamboo's pricing, driven by agent numbers, can escalate for large-scale operations, though its robust features often justify the cost. It offers structured pricing but could improve agent cost flexibility. Buildkite's pricing is competitive with a per-user model and self-hosted agent options, offering economic benefits for enterprises. Both tools provide significant ROI through time savings and productivity enhancements, varying by organization needs and usage.

To learn more, read our detailed Bamboo vs. Buildkite Report (Updated: July 2025).

Download the complete report

Bamboo vs. Buildkite

July 2025

Helped 865,384 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Bamboo

Ranking in Build Automation

7th

Average Rating

7.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Buildkite

Ranking in Build Automation

9th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Bamboo is 6.0%, down from 8.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Buildkite is 1.6%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation

Featured Reviews

Cuneyt-Gurses

Director of Cloud Solution Group at DTech Cloud Corporation

Useful for continuous deployment, but the stability must be improved

The setup is moderately difficult. It is not highly complicated, but it is not easy. We must go through some steps to complete the implementation. Once the product is implemented, it will be stable. We face some challenges since the tool is deployed on-premise. The capabilities are adequate for our needs, though.

Read full review

Prabin Silwal

Senior Engineering Consultant at ASSURANCE IQ, INC.

Has an easy setup phase while also offering good documentation

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The most valuable features of Bamboo are its performance and UI. Additionally, there are a lot of useful plugins, integration with other solutions, such as Bitbucket and Jira, and a helpful online community."

"The tool is useful for continuous deployment."

"We use Bamboo to automate all our test builds and deployments. It integrates with tools like the ReportPortal to help us check and evaluate processes. When we initiate commands, it automatically checks for scaling issues or failures related to new code. Based on these evaluations, it provides reports in the ReportPortal, helping us decide whether to implement changes."

"Bamboo's integration with the rest of Atlassian's tech tools, like Jira, helps manage the end-to-end development and release process."

"The platform helps us with automated and timely backup. It provides data replication as well."

"One of the big things that made us choose Bamboo, is it seamlessly integrates its APIs into NetSuite, which is our main ELP system."

"In my experience Bamboo is scalable."

"It can do the CI pipeline well."

More Bamboo pros

"The solution can be considered as a very well-polished platform with a really great UI."

"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."

"It is a stable solution."

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

"You don't have to set up an agent in Buildkite like in Jenkins."

"Buildkite allows us to build automations and integration tasks effectively."

"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."

"The tool's flexibility with pipelines gave us a lot of advantages, especially when managing a huge amount of microservices."

More Buildkite pros

Cons

"Integrating workflows with other platforms can be challenging. The capabilities of these platforms sometimes fall short compared to others. Initially, it was difficult for us because the plugins were very limited."

"The solution needs to support more customization in the training. What's offered is pretty generic. They need better training and should offer more guidance."

"Bamboo can improve by providing more with scripting, such as they have with Jenkins. Bamboo is more UI-driven at this time, Jenkins is going in that direction too."

"It's a little outdated. It's three years old."

"The marketing strategy of Bamboo is an area of concern where improvements are needed."

"It should be much easier to use. It shouldn't require a lot of reading to be able to use it. It should have just two or three screens rather than hundreds of screens requiring a lot of clicking. It also requires a lot of integration. It has a steep learning curve. It takes a lot of time to understand and put in the data. There is also no proper training."

"Bamboo is a bit complicated to use compared to other solutions, such as GitLab. You have to integrate different actions that are difficult that could be made easier."

"The tool is not capable of using YAML efficiently."

More Bamboo cons

"The solution should offer more options for installing an agent and give users the option of having a separate self-hosted or provisioned agent."

"Buildkite has issues while creating or extending branches as only the first five builds in the user-interface can be accessed and post that one has to access the next builds by remembering branch names without pagination which can be inconvenient."

"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 would like to see some improvements in the hooks implementation."

"BuildKite should follow some providers like GitHub Actions. They can offer a shared agent or cloud agent."

"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."

"Since we were using Buildkite for the first time, we had a lot of difficulty understanding how it worked. We didn't find any documentation from third parties; only Buildkite provided documentation. As a result, we faced a steep learning curve. After some time, it became much easier to use. Initially, understanding certain features, like the R integration, was challenging."

"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."

More Buildkite cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Bamboo is reasonable."

"There is a subscription required to use Bamboo."

"The server products for small teams used to offer excellent pricing. However, Atlassian has since changed the offering and the pricing is more expensive. I do still think the solution offers good value for money."

"I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten."

"If Bamboo could provide more flexibility on pricing, that would help. On the agent side, if you want to increase the number of agents it should be less expensive. If they can provide some better pricing model, it will help, whether we are going to use it or are already using it."

"I rate the solution's pricing a three out of five."

"I find Buildkite cost-effective as it has definitely increased my productivity, especially on the deployment side. It saved a lot of my time and improved data management because I can handle different environments myself now."

"The solution's per-user pricing model suits huge enterprises but is expensive for small to medium businesses."

"We used the solution’s free version."

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

"The self-hosted option is pretty cheap."

"I don't think the tool is expensive."

"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."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Build Automation solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Comparison Review

it_user217035

Senior iOS Developer at a media company with 5,001-10,000 employees

May 27, 2015

Bamboo vs. Jenkins

A biased and subjective comparison of Bamboo and Jenkins as CI servers for mobile development, based on practical experience with both. Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (Delivery, Distribution) has been around for quite a while. But surprisingly enough on a global scale it pretty…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Computer Software Company

12%

Government

11%

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Bamboo?

Bamboo's integration with the rest of Atlassian's tech tools, like Jira, helps manage the end-to-end development and release process.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Bamboo?

I rate the solution's pricing a three out of five.

What needs improvement with Bamboo?

Integrating workflows with other platforms can be challenging. The capabilities of these platforms sometimes fall short compared to others. Initially, it was difficult for us because the plugins we...

What needs improvement with Buildkite?

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...

What is your primary use case for Buildkite?

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 fil...

What advice do you have for others considering Buildkite?

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 ...

GitHub Actions vs Buildkite

Comparisons

GitLab vs Bamboo

Compared 28% of the time

GitHub Actions vs Bamboo

Compared 24% of the time

Jenkins vs Bamboo

Compared 12% of the time

Tekton vs Bamboo

Compared 11% of the time

Harness vs Bamboo

Compared 10% of the time

More Bamboo Competitors

Compared 34% of the time

Harness vs Buildkite

Compared 16% of the time

Tekton vs Buildkite

Compared 15% of the time

GitLab vs Buildkite

Compared 13% of the time

Nx vs Buildkite

Compared 12% of the time

More Buildkite Competitors

Product Reports

Download Bamboo product report

Bamboo

August 2025

Download Buildkite product report

August 2025

Overview

Bamboo is a continuous integration and delivery tool that ties automated builds, tests and releases together in a single workflow. It works great alongside JIRA and Stash providing a fully traceable deployment pipeline.

Atlassian

Buildkite is a powerful CI/CD tool praised for its scalability and flexibility in automating and managing complex workflows across multiple platforms. Its integration capabilities with various systems and supports for secure, customizable environments enhance development efficiency and data privacy. The feedback highlights significant boosts in productivity and operational cost reduction, making Buildkite a strategic asset for businesses aiming to streamline development tasks and align with organizational goals.

Sample Customers

Neocleus, MuleSoft, Interspire

Information Not Available