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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
16th
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
12th
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 August 2026, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Buildkite is 3.3%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of TeamCity is 4.9%, down from 7.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Build Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
TeamCity4.9%
Buildkite3.3%
Other91.8%
Build Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Hamza AlZa'Atreh - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. DevOps Engineer at Bank aletihad
Have great plugins, pipeline options and offer webhooks for integration
BuildKite should follow some providers like GitHub Actions. They can offer a shared agent or cloud agent. If you have some builds that don't require a private environment or support data, you can use their shared data. For example, with Buildkite, I can use self-hosted agents running on my infrastructure and public shared agents. I will pay for the production minutes used as the production agent. For instance, if my job runs for ten minutes, I will be charged for ten minutes of usage.
RG
IT Professional at NatWest Group
Versatile agent support boosts builds but UI and setup costs need refinement
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 to the version we were using. For instance, there were issues with agent specifications for particular build jobs and a timeout issue where jobs running longer than three hours would fail automatically.

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."
"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."
"They have great plugins, scalability, UI, and pipeline options. They also offer webhooks that allow integration with custom setups to send events dynamically."
"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 documentation is quite helpful."
"The product's initial setup phase was easy."
"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."
"It's easy to move to a new release because of templates and meta-runners, and agent pooling."
"Continuous integration has reduced build failures and highlighted issues sooner."
"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."
"It is vital to our business to have quick and robust builds, and TeamCity is helping us to keep everything tidy and under control."
"VCS Trigger: Provides excellent source control support."
"It was simple and easy to use, with great features which are always customizable."
"I have used Jenkins, TFS, Cruise Control .net, and GO, and I switched from using Cruise Control .net as TeamCity is easier to use and displays important information very well, with great support for integrating to other products from JetBrains and other vendors such as Atlassian, JIRA, and Windows AD."
"The setup is extremely straightforward."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"Compared to market leaders like Azure DevOps and Jenkins, Buildkite's community is smaller, but they do have some documentation."
"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."
"It gets very complex if you want the tool to scale automatically."
"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."
"The product must provide better integration with other tools."
"It will benefit this solution if they keep up to date with other CI/CD systems out there."
"We would like to see better integration with other version controls, since we encountered difficulty when this was first attempted."
"There have been times when making copies of a project has caused major stability issues, especially when you have nested project structure based off of different build configuration templates."
"Integrating with certain technologies posed challenges related to time and required support from the respective technology teams to ensure smooth integration with TeamCity."
"Last time I used it, dotnet compilation had to be done via PowerShell scripts. There was actually a lot that had to be scripted."
"Their online documentation is fairly extensive, but sometimes you can end up navigating in circles to find answers. I would like them (or partner with someone)​ to provide training classes to help newcomers get things up and running more quickly."
"However, in TeamCity, the whole build is like a whole block, and there is no way to stop."
"Deployment functions need work."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"For a business plan, it was 19 USD per month per user."
"We used the solution’s free version."
"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."
"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 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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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Outsourcing Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
 

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 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 ...
What is your primary use case for TeamCity?
We use TeamCity for build configuration and pipeline creation, as well as for automation purposes. We provide working pipelines for different teams internally.
 

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: August 2026.
908,877 professionals have used our research since 2012.