Buildkite vs GoCD comparison

Buildkite and Thoughtworks are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Buildkite is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.2, while Thoughtworks is ranked #16 with an average rating of 7.3. Buildkite holds a 1.6% mindshare in BA, compared to Thoughtworks’s 1.6% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of Buildkite users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 88% of Thoughtworks users who would recommend it.

Buildkite

Read 14 Buildkite reviews

394 Views
394 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

GoCD

Read 7 GoCD reviews

881 Views
617 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Buildkite

GoCD

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

GoCD and Buildkite compete in the continuous integration and delivery space, with Buildkite generally having the advantage due to advanced features, although GoCD is noted for better pricing and support.

Features: GoCD is praised for its visualization capabilities, easy versioned configuration tracking, and comprehensive auditing tools. Buildkite is lauded for elastic scalability, the ability to run pipelines on any infrastructure, and great integration capabilities.

Room for Improvement: GoCD could benefit from an expanded plugin ecosystem, enhanced cloud integration, and streamlined user experience. Buildkite, while strong in many areas, could improve on simplifying its setup process, providing more built-in features without manual configurations, and offering further enhancements to its user interface for better accessibility.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: GoCD's on-premise deployment appeals to organizations wanting internal control and is backed by robust service. Buildkite offers a seamless SaaS deployment experience with minimal maintenance, making it ideal for cloud-based operations, with commendable customer support that efficiently resolves complex queries.

Pricing and ROI: GoCD's open-source nature offers cost-effective pricing, making it appealing to budget-conscious teams with significant ROI. Buildkite, despite higher costs, provides strong ROI through time-saving automation, making it more attractive to larger organizations with complex pipelines.

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

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite vs. GoCD

July 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

9th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

GoCD

Ranking in Build Automation

16th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (15th), Release Automation (10th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Buildkite is 1.6%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of GoCD is 1.6%, up from 1.6% 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.

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Nishant Narayan Singh

DevOps Architect at Cognizant

Simplifies the pipeline process, but the access control system needs enhancement

One area of product improvement is the access control system. It is difficult to assign different access levels because it relies on separate keys for developer and admin access, which could be simplified. The folder structure is another aspect that could be enhanced, as all jobs are displayed on a single page without the clear organization seen in Jenkins. Implementing a more structured approach to organizing jobs would improve user experience. AI could simplify job creation. For example, instead of manually editing pipelines as code, an AI tool could allow users to input variables and automatically generate the required jobs. It would help reduce human errors, such as issues that arise from incorrect edits in large code files.

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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."

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

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

"The product's initial setup phase was easy."

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

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

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

More Buildkite pros

"Permission separations mean that we can grant limited permissions for each team or team member."

"The most notable aspect is its user interface, which we find to be user-friendly and straightforward for deploying and comprehending pipelines. We have the ability to create multiple pipelines, and in addition to that, the resource consumption is impressive."

"GoCD's open-source nature is valuable."

"The UI is colorful."

Cons

"The product must provide better integration with other tools."

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

"It gets very complex if you want the tool to scale automatically."

"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."

"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."

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

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

More Buildkite cons

"The tool must be more user-friendly."

"The documentation really should be improved by including real examples and more setup cases."

"The aspect that requires attention is the user management component. When integrating with BitLabs and authenticating through GitLab, there are specific features we desire. One important feature is the ability to import users directly from GitLab, along with their respective designations, and assign appropriate privileges based on that information. Allocating different privileges to users is a time-consuming process for us."

"It is difficult to assign different access levels because it relies on separate keys for developer and admin access, which could be simplified."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"This is an open-source solution and it is inexpensive."

"It's an open-source and free tool."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

Retailer

Recreational Facilities/Services 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 do you like most about GoCD?

The UI is colorful.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for GoCD?

The product is free of cost.

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What needs improvement with GoCD?

See all answers

Comparisons

GitHub Actions vs Buildkite

Compared 34% of the time

Harness vs Buildkite

Compared 16% of the time

Tekton vs Buildkite

Compared 15% of the time

GitLab vs Buildkite

Compared 13% of the time

Nx vs Buildkite

Compared 12% of the time

More Buildkite Competitors

Jenkins vs GoCD

Compared 28% of the time

GitLab vs GoCD

Compared 27% of the time

GitHub Actions vs GoCD

Compared 18% of the time

Tekton vs GoCD

Compared 9% of the time

BMC Release Lifecycle Management vs GoCD

Compared 9% of the time

More GoCD Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite

August 2025

Download Buildkite product report

Buyer's Guide

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites

August 2025

Download GoCD product report

Also Known As

No data available

Adaptive ALM, Thoughtworks Go

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

GoCD is an open source continuous delivery server created by ThoughtWorks. GoCD offers businesses a first-class build and deployment engine for complete control and visibility. It was designed for continuous delivery and the concepts essential to this practice are built in at the core.

Thoughtworks

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Ancestry.com, Barclay Card, AutoTrader, BT Financial Group, Gamesys, Nike, Vodafone, Haufe Lexware, Medidata, Hoovers

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite vs. GoCD

July 2025

Free Report: Buildkite vs. GoCD

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