Buildkite vs CircleCI comparison

Buildkite and CircleCI are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Buildkite is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.2, while CircleCI is ranked #14 with an average rating of 4.0. Additionally, 92% of Buildkite users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 66% of CircleCI users who would recommend it.

Buildkite

Read 14 Buildkite reviews

254 Views
99 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

CircleCI

Read 5 CircleCI reviews

1,154 Views
1,041 Comparison Views

66% willing to recommend

Buildkite

CircleCI

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

CircleCI and Buildkite are competing products in the continuous integration and delivery space. Buildkite appears to have an advantage in deployment features, while CircleCI excels in user satisfaction due to its pricing and support.

Features: CircleCI provides strong integration capabilities and customizable workflows, along with robust documentation. Its simplicity makes it an attractive option for teams. Buildkite offers powerful agent technology, flexible build environments, and greater control over pipelines, all contributing to effective infrastructure management.

Room for Improvement: CircleCI could enhance its deployment features to better compete with Buildkite. More detailed reporting and advanced configuration options would also be beneficial. Buildkite, while robust, could improve by providing more user-friendly support resources and reducing complexity in setup to appeal to a wider audience. Enhancing compatibility with more third-party tools could also drive wider adoption.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: CircleCI's cloud-based deployment model allows for quick setup and managed services, with customer service known for responsive support. Buildkite's self-hosting approach offers more control and customization but can increase complexity. However, its customer service is praised for technical expertise, appealing to tech-savvy users.

Pricing and ROI: CircleCI's straightforward and budget-friendly plans cater to various scales, resulting in noticeable ROI without high initial setup costs. Conversely, Buildkite may require a higher initial expenditure due to self-hosting but promises a significant long-term ROI given its flexibility and integration capability for complex infrastructures.

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

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite vs. CircleCI

April 2025

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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

Buildkite

Ranking in Build Automation

8th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

CircleCI

Ranking in Build Automation

14th

Average Rating

6.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Featured Reviews

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.

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reviewer0972521

Chief Technology Officer at Kyberlife

Unhelpful support, unclear billing, and has offers ability to track usage

We've had occasional connectivity issues with cloud resources and build failure due to its own internal system setup and environment. That costs us credits. Support engineers do not thoroughly read and understand issues when emailing them. They reply to me with a totally different context about the problem. Just yesterday, my web applications failed to 'yarn build' after I downgraded the resource class from extr-large to large. I contacted support and got no reply. Billing is a mess. There is duplicate information in the bill downloaded from their website and when I asked for a consolidated bill, they just answered that they didn't have it. There is no transparency on how many billed minutes and credits I spent each day both on their website and the monthly bill which makes it difficult to understand when the monthly bill contains many refill item charges. It is difficult or impossible to track usage and burndown of my subscription and to gain total outstanding refill amounts on a daily basis. Their website doesn't provide sufficient information on credits allocated/calculated for my extra-large resource class.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

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

"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 product's initial setup phase was easy."

"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."

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

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

More Buildkite pros

"It's a stable product."

"The automation workflow in CircleCI related to third-party applications is very good and allows standardization of applications."

"The solution offers continuous integration and continuous delivery."

"Some of the most valuable features include container-based builds, integration with Bit Bucket and being able to store artifacts."

"The ability to automate the build process in a seamless way and run workflows effortlessly. It supports parallel builds so it can scale well. Also, it covers the basics of any build and integration tool, including email notifications (especially when tests are fixed), project insights, etc."

"Enables us to detect exactly which build failed and why, and to push multiple builds to our production environment at a very fast rate."

Cons

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

"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."

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

"There is a need for rework occasionally, and issues like syntax errors can occur multiple times, especially when manual changes are made in AWS or Amazon Connect that are not captured in the code."

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

"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."

"As a newbie, I think BuildKite has several issues. For example, it can't get the status of a PR once it's closed. The syntax is easy to use, but updating a pipeline requires administrator settings, and viewing pipelines for others isn't straightforward."

More Buildkite cons

"There needs to be some improvement in the user interface of CircleCI."

"Billing is a mess."

"The solution’s pricing could be better."

"Integration with Microsoft Azure is one area for improvement. Azure is growing in its user base, and supports various cloud infrastructure components such as Service Fabric, App Service, etc. Some of Azure’s deployment models (like Kudu) require a steep learning curve, but if CircleCI would come up with such features (deployment to App Service) out of the box, it would be amazing."

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

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

"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."

"We used the solution’s free version."

"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."

"The self-hosted option is pretty cheap."

"The price of CircleCI could be less expensive."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

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Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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...

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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...

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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 ...

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What do you like most about CircleCI?

The solution offers continuous integration and continuous delivery.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CircleCI?

Beware of skyrocketing bills as CircleCI does not provide transparency into how they charge refills. Their monthly billing statement is almost unreadable and their online dashboard doesn't provide ...

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What needs improvement with CircleCI?

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Compared 19% of the time

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Compared 16% of the time

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Compared 12% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite

April 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Build Automation

April 2025

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Overview

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.

Buildkite

CircleCI is a leading platform for automating continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD), valued for its capability to manage software updates efficiently. With an easy-to-configure system using YAML files and robust Docker support, CircleCI streamlines backend updates, frontend developments, and mobile app testing across devices. Its parallelism feature and insightful dashboard reduce processing times and improve workflow visibility, respectively, enhancing team collaboration and productivity while maintaining high-quality outputs across development stages.

CircleCI

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Shopify, Zenefits, Concur Technologies, CyberAgent

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite vs. CircleCI

April 2025

Free Report: Buildkite vs. CircleCI

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