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Buildkite vs Digital.ai Release comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

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
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Digital.ai Release
Ranking in Build Automation
15th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Release Automation (9th), DevSecOps (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Buildkite is 1.4%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Digital.ai Release is 1.0%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Build Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Prabin Silwal - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Jeanne-Mari Chandran - PeerSpot reviewer
Experience seamless project management and integration with robust tools
The features I find most valuable in Digital.ai Release are the integration with MS Teams, because we have MS Teams channels that publish or push notifications to that. When we start deployments, it sends a notification to the people that we are doing a deployment to their environment. It notifies them when the deployment is started, completed, or if attention is required. I also appreciate the fact that it has plugins for Bamboo and I use lots of Gradle and JSON scripts, and we do SQL upgrades as well, triggering Flyway scripts via Bamboo, along with the integration with XLD and Jira; it's all Atlassian software. Regarding environment management capabilities, Digital.ai Release is mostly useful for me, as it is more application related and that is managed via my XLD dictionary. We have one artifact that is environment agnostic, which has placeholders that correspond to my XLD keys and values, and at deployment time, it substitutes the placeholders with those environment specific values. We don't need to make a specific deployment artifact for dev, test, or production; it is all the same artifact using environment variables, ensuring what we take to production is what was tested.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"They have great plugins, scalability, UI, and pipeline options. They also offer webhooks that allow integration with custom setups to send events dynamically."
"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."
"The tool's flexibility with pipelines gave us a lot of advantages, especially when managing a huge amount of microservices."
"You don't have to set up an agent in Buildkite like in Jenkins."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of Digital.ai Release is its ability to communicate with various deployment systems, such as XLD and batch deployments, as well as integrate with tools, such as Flyway and Bamboo. We use Bamboo as our build orchestrator, and Digital.ai Release also integrates with Jira, another Atlassian solution. These capabilities make it a powerful tool for managing workflow, test automation, and other processes."
"The time is also reduced because the manual work has tremendously decreased. We just have to click one button, and it will create everything for us."
"The orchestration, building the release, and then just executing it and managing that pipeline — the orchestration capabilities are great for that."
"The solution can apply one template across multiple applications."
"Overall, I would give Digital.ai Release a rating of nine out of ten; there's always room for improvement, but it's really good."
 

Cons

"Compared to market leaders like Azure DevOps and Jenkins, Buildkite's community is smaller, but they do have some documentation."
"BuildKite should follow some providers like GitHub Actions. They can offer a shared agent or cloud agent."
"Based on the load, the agents can be scaled up and scaled down, and while they are scaling up, sometimes they just get stuck."
"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."
"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."
"The product must provide better integration with other tools."
"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."
"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."
"The solution is a little bit expensive."
"Digital.ai Release could improve by having a better plugin that works with Guardian that we use for mainframe migrations. If there could be an interface or plugin for Guardian that would be beneficial."
"The backfill could be improved, we could automate that. Right now it's subjective — it's up to the lead developer's memory to remember to backfill."
"I would like to improve Digital.ai Release by exploring its cloud capabilities as we are currently in the middle of migrating to the cloud, but I actually have no idea what Digital.ai's cloud capabilities are."
"Currently, we put artifact details manually. What we could improve, in our case, is the deployment instruction base. Developers input all the information, including which artifact and where it needs to be deployed. What Digital.ai could do is automatically go to the deployment instruction page, take those artifact details, and implement them."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"We used the solution’s free version."
"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."
"The self-hosted option is pretty cheap."
"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 solution's license includes all features."
"Overall, the price is just too high; especially considering we're in the middle of a pandemic."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
38%
Computer Software Company
19%
Healthcare Company
8%
Government
7%
 

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...
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 ...
What do you like most about Digital.ai Release ?
The time is also reduced because the manual work has tremendously decreased. We just have to click one button, and it will create everything for us.
What needs improvement with Digital.ai Release ?
Based on my experience, I would like to improve Digital.ai Release by exploring its cloud capabilities as we are currently in the middle of migrating to the cloud, but I actually have no idea what ...
What is your primary use case for Digital.ai Release ?
My use case for Digital.ai Release is that I work for an insurance company on a very big project that develops multiple different pieces of software. We use Digital.ai Release to move our software ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
XL Release, XebiaLabs XL Release
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
3M, GE, John Deere, Deutsche Telekom, Cable & Wireless, Xerox, and Société Générale, Liberty Mutual, EA, Rabobank
Find out what your peers are saying about Buildkite vs. Digital.ai Release and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
863,641 professionals have used our research since 2012.