Buildkite vs Jenkins comparison

Buildkite and Jenkins are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Buildkite is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.2, while Jenkins is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.1. Buildkite holds a 1.2% mindshare in BA, compared to Jenkins’s 10.5% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of Buildkite users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of Jenkins users who would recommend it.

Buildkite

Read 14 Buildkite reviews

304 Views
110 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Jenkins

Read 93 Jenkins reviews

3,827 Views
2,496 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Buildkite

Jenkins

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

Jenkins and Buildkite compete in the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) space. While both offer robust platforms, Jenkins has the upper hand with its extensive plugin support, offering greater flexibility and customization.

Features: Jenkins provides extensive plugin support, flexibility, and scalability, allowing users to build pipelines and integrate with various tools. Buildkite offers ease in workflow management through YAML configurations, effective caching mechanisms for Docker containers, and a streamlined deployment process.

Room for Improvement: Jenkins could enhance its interface for a modern look and improve the stability and usability of less common plugins. Specific issues exist with some plugins and integration with certain systems like Docker. Buildkite needs better third-party integration, improved plugin flexibility, and faster resolution of scalability concerns.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Jenkins supports on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments, offering flexibility but can be complex to set up initially. Its strong community support is vast due to its open-source nature, though official customer support is limited. Buildkite primarily operates in the public cloud environment, providing simpler deployment for cloud-native setups. Both benefit from strong community support, but Jenkins's open-source model promotes more community-driven solutions, whereas Buildkite’s commercial model offers a more unified customer experience.

Pricing and ROI: Jenkins is free and open-source, making it cost-effective for businesses investing in setup and maintenance. It offers a significant ROI through improved productivity and reduced operational costs via automation. Buildkite's pricing is user-based and may be more accessible in terms of initial and ongoing costs, which is beneficial for teams using cloud solutions for deployment.

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

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite vs. Jenkins

June 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

Jenkins

Ranking in Build Automation

3rd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

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 Jenkins is 10.5%, down from 13.0% 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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Mahdi Mallaki

Senior Devops Engineer at Rakuten

Has a community of plugin providers but needs improvement in Kubernetes integration

Integrating Jenkins with other tools or solutions has presented some challenges. For instance, when attempting to integrate Jenkins with Kubernetes, I encountered numerous errors, which took several days to resolve. In Jenkins, adding a feature typically involves incorporating the repository feature separately. Jenkins lacks built-in Git repository functionality, necessitating an external Git repository to store Jenkins manifests. In contrast, GitLab offers an integrated Git repository and pipeline runner, streamlining the process. One improvement for Jenkins could be integrating a Git server, simplifying the management of CI/CD pipelines. Currently, with Jenkins, modifying pipeline manifests requires navigating to a separate Git repository. In GitLab, however, manifest changes can be made directly within the repository.

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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."

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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 documentation is quite helpful."

More Buildkite pros

"We significantly reduced build times of large projects (more than 80k lines of Scala code) using build time on Jenkins as a time sample. It reduced the developer write-test-commit cycle time, and increased productivity."

"It offers continuous deployment and continuous testing. It enables us to figure out anything."

"Jenkins is particularly valuable since it saves time by automating manual tasks."

"The initial setup is pretty simple."

"Different types of jobs, such as Pipeline, Build, Freestyle, Maven, etc."

"I love Jenkins. I like that you work on anything, and you make anything. Jenkins is very important for my team. I am satisfied with the product."

"I like the business logs. It's a very useful tool. Client-server communication is also very fast."

"Jenkins' most valuable feature is Pipeline."

More Jenkins pros

Cons

"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 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."

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

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

"Based on the load, the agents can be scaled up and scaled down, and while they are scaling up, sometimes they just get stuck."

More Buildkite cons

"The solution's UI can use a facelift and the logs can use more detailed information."

"I would like them to provide space for people to have a central node that stores all the logs of workspace information in a distributed fashion to facilitate backup and restoration. Currently, everything is stored on one node, so you need to set up distributed storage or an endpoint that you can use for backing up your information."

"UI is quite outdated."

"Jenkins is not an easy solution to use and the configuration is not simple. They can improve the solution by adding a graphical interface that is more user-friendly."

"The bug fix speed is very slow."

"It does not have a very user-friendly interface."

"Adding support for OIDC and internal user databases simultaneously would improve Jenkins."

"There is no way for the cloud repositories to trigger Jenkins."

More Jenkins cons

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."

"The self-hosted option is pretty cheap."

"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."

"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."

"We use the tool's open-source version which is free. There is an enterprise version which is expensive but comes with better support."

"It's free software with a big community behind it, which is very good."

"Jenkins is open source."

"It is free."

"The solution is one of the lowest costs compared to competitors."

"We are using the freeware version of Jenkins."

"It is a free product."

"The pricing for Jenkins is free."

More Jenkins pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user184734

Systems Administrator at Facebook

Jan 22, 2015

I generally find TeamCity a lot more intuitive than Jenkins.

Moving to TeamCity from Jenkins At work, we’re slowly migrating from Jenkins to TeamCity in the hope of ending some of our recurring problems with continuous integration. My use of Jenkins prior to this job has been almost strictly on a personal basis, although I pretty much only use Travis…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

18%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

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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How does Tekton compare with Jenkins?

When you are evaluating tools for automating your own GitOps-based CI/CD workflow, it is important to keep your requirements and use cases in mind. Tekton deployment is complex and it is not very e...

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What do you like most about Jenkins?

Jenkins has been instrumental in automating our build and deployment processes.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Jenkins?

Jenkins is used in many companies to save money, especially within R&D divisions, by avoiding the expenses of proprietary tools.

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

Harness vs Jenkins

Compared 16% of the time

GitLab vs Jenkins

Compared 13% of the time

Bazel vs Jenkins

Compared 9% of the time

Tekton vs Jenkins

Compared 8% of the time

Bamboo vs Jenkins

Compared 7% of the time

More Jenkins Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite

June 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Jenkins

June 2025

Download Jenkins 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

Jenkins is an award-winning application that monitors executions of repeated jobs, such as building a software project or jobs run by cron.

Jenkins

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Airial, Clarus Financial Technology, cubetutor, Metawidget, mysocio, namma, silverpeas, Sokkva, So Rave, tagzbox

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite vs. Jenkins

June 2025

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