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Buildkite vs TeamCity 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
TeamCity
Ranking in Build Automation
10th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
28
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 TeamCity is 7.4%, up from 6.7% 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.
Almoeeni Fazal - PeerSpot reviewer
Impressive pipeline efficiency with helpful support and a fairly straightforward setup
We use TeamCity for the CI/CD pipeline. It is used for deploying code from the desktop to the production environment. We push our code to GitHub, which then creates a pipeline to a server using AWS, deploying automatically without errors or conflicts in GitHub branches.  We also use TeamCity's…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"It is a stable solution."
"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."
"The documentation is quite helpful."
"The tool is simple and has no learning curve. If you know YAML, you can master it. It is simple to learn."
"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 integration is a valuable feature."
"TeamCity's GUI is nice."
"Good integration with IDE and JetBrains products."
"VCS Trigger: Provides excellent source control support."
"Time to deployment has been reduced in situations where we want to deploy to production or deploy breaking changes."
"TeamCity is more structured and user-friendly than other vendors."
"We would like to see better integration with other version controls, since we encountered difficulty when this we first attempted."
"Using TeamCity and emailing everyone on fail is one way to emphasize the importance of testing code and showing management why taking the time to test actually does saves time from having to fix bugs on the other end."
 

Cons

"Based on the load, the agents can be scaled up and scaled down, and while they are scaling up, sometimes they just get stuck."
"I would like to see some improvements in the hooks implementation."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"We've called TeamCity tech support. Unfortunately, all their tech support is based in Europe, so we end up with such a big time crunch that I now need to have one person in the US."
"The integration between other solutions and TeamCity could be smoother."
"The UI for this solution could be improved. New users don't find it easy to navigate. The need some level of training to understand the ins and the outs."
"I would like to see an improvement where TeamCity alerts us via email or another medium if there are discrepancies between the code in the staging environment and what has been deployed to production, such as missing updates."
"I would suggest creating simple and advanced configurations. Advanced configurations will give more customizations like Jenkins does."
"The upgrade process could be smoother. Upgrading major versions can often cause some pain."
"It will benefit this solution if they keep up to date with other CI/CD systems out there."
"Integrating with certain technologies posed challenges related to time and required support from the respective technology teams to ensure smooth integration with TeamCity."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 solution's per-user pricing model suits huge enterprises but is expensive for small to medium businesses."
"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."
"The self-hosted option is pretty cheap."
"The licensing is on an annual basis."
"Start with the free tier for a few build configs and see how it works for you, then according to your scale find the enterprise license which fits you the most."
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Comparison Review

it_user184734 - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
25%
Computer Software Company
18%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

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...
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 TeamCity?
One of the most beneficial features for us is the flexibility it offers in creating deployment steps tailored to different technologies.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for TeamCity?
Compared to new technologies, TeamCity is more expensive and is an older tool compared to tools like GitLab.
What needs improvement with TeamCity?
TeamCity's user interface could be improved; specifically, the tree structure on the homepage is not clear, making it difficult to search for projects. Moreover, there are some limitations related ...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Toyota, Xerox, Apple, MIT, Volkswagen, HP, Twitter, Expedia
Find out what your peers are saying about Buildkite vs. TeamCity and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
853,868 professionals have used our research since 2012.