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 #7 with an average rating of 8.3. 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

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99 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

CloudBees

Read 20 CloudBees reviews

770 Views
148 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Buildkite

CloudBees

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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: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite vs. CloudBees

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

CloudBees

Ranking in Build Automation

7th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Configuration Management (11th), Value Stream Management Software (3rd), DevSecOps (5th)

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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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.

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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

"Using Buildkite, it's much easier to manage pipelines. It's straightforward to understand what each pipeline returns, making it easy to edit configurations, such as passwords. Although there is a steep learning curve initially, the overall process is still comprehensible. Additionally, Buildkite offers features like hooks and triggers; for example, an action in the app can automatically trigger a pipeline. These elements can be added to specific pipelines, ensuring the entire process is automated."

"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."

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

"Buildkite makes it easier to conduct deployment. When I merge a PR in Buildkite, it automatically starts the deployment process. It used to be challenging to shift code from the development branch to the testing branch because I had to follow up with multiple developers. Previously, I was dependent on the DevOps team and developers to handle deployments, but now it allows me to deploy the solutions myself.This has made it much easier for me to handle both non-production and production environments."

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

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

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

More Buildkite pros

"CloudBees's user interface is very simple and user-friendly."

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

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

"The initial setup is easy."

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

"CloudBees is a user-friendly tool."

"It can manage multiple Jenkins instances."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is that its GUI is quite simple."

More CloudBees pros

Cons

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

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

"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."

"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 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."

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

"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."

"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."

More Buildkite cons

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

"The user interface of CloudBees is good but could be even more intuitive. Improving the user-friendliness of the interface and having simpler setup configurations would greatly benefit new users."

"I noticed that CloudBees runs too slowly because some applications run more than 50 pipelines."

"We did face some challenges, particularly with the infrastructure."

"The platform could integrate better with other tools and support external tools directly."

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

"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."

"It could improve the document upload process."

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."

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

"The self-hosted option is pretty cheap."

"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."

"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."

"We used the solution’s free version."

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

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Financial Services Firm

26%

Manufacturing Company

12%

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...

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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 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.

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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

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite

April 2025

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Buyer's Guide

CloudBees

April 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

April 2025

Free Report: Buildkite vs. CloudBees

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