Bamboo vs IBM Rational Build Forge vs Jenkins comparison

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Bamboo

IBM Rational Build Forge

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Bamboo, IBM Rational Build Forge, and Jenkins based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about GitLab, Google, Jenkins and others in Build Automation.

To learn more, read our detailed Build Automation Report (Updated: April 2025).

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Build Automation

April 2025

Helped 850,236 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:

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Bamboo is 7.1%, down from 9.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Rational Build Forge is 0.8%, down from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jenkins is 10.4%, down from 13.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation

Featured Reviews

Andrea Carella

DevOps Engineer at Politecnico di Milano

High availability, helpful support, and plenty of plugins available

I have used Google Cloud Platform and Amazon AWS for implementing Bamboo. It is not difficult to complete. The length of time it takes for deployment depends on a lot of variables, such as how the pipeline is deployed and what type of infrastructure is present. However, it typically takes only hours not days. I rate the setup of Bamboo a nine out of ten.

Great reporting features and very functional

Amy DeLorge

CRM Program Release Manager at Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center

The solution could be more user friendly. Trying to train somebody on it can be difficult. If you're in this field, you kind of learn the tools, but trying to show a PM how to find report sheets to pull data was difficult. I had to show them how to write the queries and pull the data that they needed. It's not a layman's solution. If you're working with a programmer or with an architect, you won't have issues trying to relay how to utilize the tool. It was for those who cut the checks where there were problems enabling them to pull the data they required. I guess the answer is DevOps, but it depends on your environment. Just being able to sign into dashboards and get accurate results was my biggest thing with my PMs on my projects. They like charts and pie graphs, the ability to see things at a glance data where they could make decisions on the fly.

A highly-scalable and stable solution that reduces deployment time and produces a significant return on investment

Dinesh-Patil

Consultant at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

The dashboard needs to be improved. Though the access management and authentication functionalities are present, the dashboard and UI could be more user-friendly. The product has many plug-ins. Users have to go through the documentation to be able to use the product. The UI must be more user-friendly. The information should be available in the dashboard itself. The users shouldn’t have to refer to the documentation. When a user hovers over the elements on the dashboard, it should reveal information about them.

More Jenkins pricing and cost advice

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

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

"The tool is useful for continuous deployment."

"In my experience Bamboo is scalable."

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

"In Bamboo, build and deployment have been segregated. The build plan and deployment plan are different. When comparing Bamboo to other solutions, the native feature you will not find in another tool, such as Jenkins. They have segregated the build and deployment plan. This means, building the application and deploying it are two separate parts in Bamboo, they have segregated it apart from the UI. This makes the tool a bit better compared to other tools."

"It's one of the best solutions in this line of work. We have many Atlassian products. We use Bamboo, JIRA, Service Desk, and some other Atlassian plugins. We like that it's easy to integrate into each other. It's a suite of services."

"Bamboo was used extensively in our organization for PCA compliance."

"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."

More Bamboo pros

"Very good reporting features."

"All features are useful. Our customer doesn't have any complaints about the tool. It works pretty well for what they want and what they need to do."

"Has a good interface, is reliable and saves time."

"With Jenkins, the pipeline will take your code from any versioning system like GitHub or Bitbucket. All the security scans can happen in one go and then all the tests also get run. You can just build one container in it and deploy it."

"The most valuable aspect of this solution is that there are multiple features. We can abstract certain variables and then build our deployment routine while being able to do some abstraction onto the SSH connections."

"Jenkins has been instrumental in automating our build and deployment processes."

"We significantly reduced build times of large projects (more than 80k lines of Scala code) using build time on Jenkins as a time sample. It reduced the developer write-test-commit cycle time, and increased productivity."

"When we have manual tasks, we have to depend on multiple technical teams. With Jenkins, we can bring all the technologies together by the click of a button. We can see results without having to depend on different teams. Jenkins makes life easy for the database and DevOps teams."

"Jenkins is a very mature product."

"It can scale easily."

More Jenkins pros

Cons

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

"Bamboo’s technical support services, in terms of speed of response, need improvement."

"The performance around the deployment feature could be improved."

"One area that could be enhanced is the governance process, particularly with regard to building approvals and transitions between stages. In comparison to other solutions, such as Jira, which features a workflow that supports approval processes, this capability is not natively available in Bamboo. To implement this functionality, integration with other solutions, such as GSM may be necessary. Although some add-ons, such as Adaptavist ScriptRunner, are available in the market to circumvent this limitation, they may not offer the exact functionality needed. Therefore, there is certainly room for improvement in this area."

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

"It can be challenging for someone new to the system or ecosystem to grasp, making it difficult to train new people and help them understand."

"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."

"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."

More Bamboo cons

"Not user friendly for the layman."

"Its logging can be improved. When something goes wrong, it is not always very easy to find the problem. It is hard to identify whether the problem is because of low memory in the server or some configuration in Rational Build Forge. The error logs are not very detailed, and they should provide more information. It should also have more integration with third-party tools. It would be great to have more integration with third-party tools."

"The enterprise version is less stable than the open-source version."

"The product should provide more visualization as to how many pipelines are performing and how many builds are happening. It should also integrate with Kubernetes and OpenShift."

"They need to improve their documentation."

"I do not have any notes for improvement."

"I would like them to provide space for people to have a central node that stores all the logs of workspace information in a distributed fashion to facilitate backup and restoration. Currently, everything is stored on one node, so you need to set up distributed storage or an endpoint that you can use for backing up your information."

"The UI of Jenkins could improve."

"The onboarding of Jenkins should be smoother, and it should have more pipelines available as it's deployed on many different servers."

"Jenkins can be improved, but it's difficult for me to explain. The initial setup could be more straightforward. If you connect Jenkins with bookings and lockouts, it can be challenging."

More Jenkins cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"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."

"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."

"There is a subscription required to use Bamboo."

"The price of Bamboo is reasonable."

Information not available

"It is free."

"We are using the free version of Jenkins. There are no costs or licensing."

"Jenkins is not expensive and reasonably priced."

"Some of the add-ons are too expensive."

"Jenkins is a free open-source server."

"Jenkins is open source and free."

"We are using the freeware version of Jenkins."

"The tool is open-source."

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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…

What do you like most about Bamboo?

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Computer Software Company

12%

Government

12%

No data available

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

18%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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

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 sho...

How does Tekton compare with Jenkins?

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Earn 20 points

When you are evaluating tools for automating your own GitOps-based CI/CD workflow, it is important to keep your requi...

What do you like most about Jenkins?

Jenkins has been instrumental in automating our build and deployment processes.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Jenkins?

Jenkins is used in many companies to save money, especially within R&D divisions, by avoiding the expenses of pro...

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Product Reports

Download Bamboo product report

Bamboo

May 2025

Download IBM Rational Build Forge product report

Build Automation

April 2025

Download Jenkins product report

April 2025

Also Known As

No data available

Rational Build Forge

No data available

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

IBM Rational Build Forge is an adaptive execution framework that helps automate and standardize the software assembly process. Rational Build Forge helps teams standardize repetitive tasks, improve software quality and manage compliance mandates. This software scales to 25 seats. Rational Build Forge delivers:
Flexibility - gives developers self-service access to preconfigured build processes from within their integrated development environment (IDE). You can add IBM Rational software products to further enhance automation, reporting and integration.
Productivity - accelerates build and release cycles through iterative development, parallel processes and efficient use of hardware.
Compliance - simplifies compliance management with self-documenting audit trails and role-based security.
Compatibility - increases team efficiency with centralized build and release management using the tools you have today.

IBM

Jenkins is an award-winning application that monitors executions of repeated jobs, such as building a software project or jobs run by cron.