Buildkite vs CloudBees comparison

Buildkite and CloudBees are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Buildkite is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.2, while CloudBees is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.3. Buildkite holds a 1.2% mindshare in BA, compared to CloudBees’s 1.4% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of Buildkite users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of CloudBees users who would recommend it.

Buildkite

Read 14 Buildkite reviews

304 Views
110 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

CloudBees

Read 20 CloudBees reviews

802 Views
116 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Buildkite

CloudBees

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

CloudBees and Buildkite compete in the CI/CD platform category. CloudBees has the upper hand in enterprise scalability and integration capabilities, while Buildkite offers a cost-effective solution with efficient deployment processes suitable for smaller teams or startups.

Features: CloudBees stands out with its scalability for large teams, integration capabilities with various tools, and strong security features. It offers significant flexibility and automation in CI/CD processes, appealing to large enterprises working with multiple Jenkins instances and platforms. In contrast, Buildkite provides straightforward management and intuitive YAML configuration with efficient cache handling and pipeline automation. It simplifies deployment processes for developers by reducing dependency on separate DevOps teams.

Room for Improvement: CloudBees encounters performance issues with complex pipelines and relies on proprietary support for updates. It also faces challenges such as extensive log management and potential reauthentication disruptions. Buildkite experiences difficulties with its Directed Acyclic Graph implementation and limited third-party integrations. Its logging can be cumbersome, and some users find the cache layering less intuitive during troubleshooting.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: CloudBees supports diverse deployment environments including on-premises and hybrid models and offers robust customer service that is responsive but could improve prioritization and issue resolution time. Users sometimes report repeated issues despite a comprehensive support system. Buildkite is deployed primarily in public cloud settings and has a less extensive support base. Users value the straightforward deployment process but wish for more comprehensive resolution mechanisms.

Pricing and ROI: CloudBees is perceived as a premium offering due to its enterprise-level support and robust feature set, providing notable ROI by saving time in deployment and process automation. Buildkite is considered more cost-effective, especially favorable for startups and smaller teams. Its pricing model allows scaling with user numbers, making it a budget-friendly option for organizations focused on Docker and containerization.

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

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite vs. CloudBees

June 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 857,162 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

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

CloudBees

Ranking in Build Automation

6th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Configuration Management (11th), Value Stream Management Software (2nd), DevSecOps (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Buildkite is 1.2%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CloudBees is 1.4%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation

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.

Read full review

YashBrahmani

Senior Associate at BNP Paribas CIB

Offers a clear visualization and overview of workflows and helpful in managing CI/CD processes

Improvement in the sense that they can do better in terms of management of logs and stuff like that because the console logs are very extensive, and that causes a lot of storage issues. That is one of the things which is there. Also, with respect to the traditional platform and the modern platform, many things have upgraded, and it has quite improved. But when we talk about the performance of the agents, it’s still very crucial because it’s not up to par. It takes a lot of time to provision the agent and to finish the build because of the SSH connection and the JNLP connection. Due to that, sometimes the agent doesn’t get provisioned. Those are some of the blockers that meet up the time in terms of administering the instance.

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

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

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

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

"It is a stable solution."

"The tool is simple and has no learning curve. If you know YAML, you can master it. It is simple to learn."

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

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

More Buildkite pros

"The solution's most valuable feature is its flexibility."

"I find the automation feature most valuable. CloudBees is highly scalable and supports both small and large teams. The deployment process is also faster when compared to on-premise."

"CloudBees assists by automating tasks, previously done manually, in the pipeline setup."

"The initial setup is easy."

"The most beneficial aspect is that CloudBees integrates with everything, like version one, GitHub, and PDM."

"The most valuable features are Java features, microservice communication, payment validation, Jenkins Sonar, management master to CloudBees, Blue Ocean, JobConfig, and support."

"The customer support is good. You get good representatives from CloudBees to help you and understand your requirements."

"It’s a very good tool for auditing your project pipelines as well."

More CloudBees pros

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."

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

More Buildkite cons

"If you're logged in and working for about thirty minutes and then go idle for five to ten minutes, Jenkins will prompt you to re-authenticate."

"To use the tool, you need to be familiar with the tool itself and with how it will be incorporated into the culture."

"There are connection issues with CloudBees, specifically between Sybase and CloudBees. W"

"I think a preview of the errors would be good just at the point where the error occurs."

"One challenge I'd like to highlight is that with CloudBees CI growing bigger and bigger, there are limitations in terms of managing old plugins and services and upgrading them with time."

"There could be improvements in the ease of use."

"The setup is somewhat complicated. You need a cloud architect and engineer to set it up properly. The initial setup will take time, so you need a good engineer and architect to handle it."

"A lot of stability issues are there with CloudBees."

More CloudBees cons

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."

"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."

"We used the solution’s free version."

"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."

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

Information not available

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

857,162 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Financial Services Firm

24%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Legal Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with CloudBees?

There are connection issues with CloudBees, specifically between Sybase and CloudBees. We often encounter connection problems, and there are issues with the pipelines.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for CloudBees?

We use CloudBees for deploying the code in higher environments, such as QA, C2, staging, and production.

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering CloudBees?

I would recommend CloudBees to others because building jobs is much easier than with other solutions.

See all answers

Comparisons

GitHub Actions vs Buildkite

Compared 39% of the time

Tekton vs Buildkite

Compared 18% of the time

Harness vs Buildkite

Compared 15% of the time

Nx vs Buildkite

Compared 15% of the time

GitLab vs Buildkite

Compared 14% of the time

More Buildkite Competitors

GitLab vs CloudBees

Compared 54% of the time

Harness vs CloudBees

Compared 28% of the time

Tekton vs CloudBees

Compared 17% of the time

More CloudBees Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite

June 2025

Download Buildkite product report

Buyer's Guide

CloudBees

June 2025

Download CloudBees product report

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

CloudBees DevOptics is a robust software utilized primarily to enhance CI/CD processes by offering real-time visibility into Jenkins pipelines. It facilitates effective monitoring, incident management, and decision-making through comprehensive data analysis. Users value its features like DevOps performance metrics and seamless tool integration, leading to improved operational efficiency and productivity in organizations.

CloudBees

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Capital One, PEGA, vistaprint, HSBC, BOSCH, Starbucks Coffee

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite vs. CloudBees

June 2025

Free Report: Buildkite vs. CloudBees

Find out what your peers are saying about Buildkite vs. CloudBees and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

857,162 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Buildkite vs. CloudBees report.

See our list of best Build Automation vendors.

We monitor all Build Automation reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.