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CircleCI vs Tekton 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

CircleCI
Ranking in Build Automation
14th
Average Rating
6.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Tekton
Ranking in Build Automation
2nd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of CircleCI is 3.3%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tekton is 9.9%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Build Automation Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Tekton9.9%
CircleCI3.3%
Other86.8%
Build Automation
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer0972521 - PeerSpot reviewer
Unhelpful support, unclear billing, and has offers ability to track usage
We've had occasional connectivity issues with cloud resources and build failure due to its own internal system setup and environment. That costs us credits. Support engineers do not thoroughly read and understand issues when emailing them. They reply to me with a totally different context about the problem. Just yesterday, my web applications failed to 'yarn build' after I downgraded the resource class from extr-large to large. I contacted support and got no reply. Billing is a mess. There is duplicate information in the bill downloaded from their website and when I asked for a consolidated bill, they just answered that they didn't have it. There is no transparency on how many billed minutes and credits I spent each day both on their website and the monthly bill which makes it difficult to understand when the monthly bill contains many refill item charges. It is difficult or impossible to track usage and burndown of my subscription and to gain total outstanding refill amounts on a daily basis. Their website doesn't provide sufficient information on credits allocated/calculated for my extra-large resource class.
Prasad Gupta - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficient CI/CD management with significant cost reduction and a user-friendly setup
One area for improvement is the number of CRDs created during installation. Tekton currently creates 10 to 11CRDs, which can be overwhelming. Instead, it would be better to have just one CRD that can handle all the information and create other necessary components automatically. Additionally, more integration capabilities for security, such as DAST, SAST, and IAST, should be directly built into Tekton to facilitate easier implementation of security features.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution offers continuous integration and continuous delivery."
"The ability to automate the build process in a seamless way and run workflows effortlessly. It supports parallel builds so it can scale well. Also, it covers the basics of any build and integration tool, including email notifications (especially when tests are fixed), project insights, etc."
"The automation workflow in CircleCI related to third-party applications is very good and allows standardization of applications."
"Some of the most valuable features include container-based builds, integration with Bit Bucket and being able to store artifacts."
"It's a stable product."
"Enables us to detect exactly which build failed and why, and to push multiple builds to our production environment at a very fast rate."
"The flexibility of Tekton is the most valuable feature"
"The ability to scale is valuable."
"Tekton is serverless and runs on OpenShift, and we leverage Tekton to take full advantage of the Kubernetes features such as running and scaling the solution in PaaS."
"The product's best feature is its ease of implementation."
"One of the best things I appreciate is that Tekton runs on the Kubernetes platform. This is very useful when working on a project with other team members. For instance, suppose we have a very big project that requires building a large amount of source code or running many unit tests. During the build and unit test phases, Tekton on Kubernetes allows us to have a scalable machine to handle these tasks. This scalability is the most useful aspect for me."
"We can make a lot of customizations, and data sharing between tasks using workspaces is very convenient."
"I would say the customization ability that Tekton provides is good."
"Tekton provides a feature where you can schedule the job."
 

Cons

"The solution’s pricing could be better."
"Billing is a mess."
"There needs to be some improvement in the user interface of CircleCI."
"Integration with Microsoft Azure is one area for improvement. Azure is growing in its user base, and supports various cloud infrastructure components such as Service Fabric, App Service, etc. Some of Azure’s deployment models (like Kudu) require a steep learning curve, but if CircleCI would come up with such features (deployment to App Service) out of the box, it would be amazing."
"For infrastructure deployment, integration is somewhat complex, especially when using Terraform with Tekton. It would be beneficial if this process were simplified."
"The stability issues can be there."
"There might be occasional issues with storage or cluster-level logging, which can affect production."
"When we started with Tekton around 2021 or early 2022, the community support was somewhat limited, which posed challenges when dealing with issues or debugging. We had to rely on Red Hat OpenShift support to overcome these challenges. However, I believe that these issues will naturally improve over timeas the developer community grows stronger. From a technical perspective, I haven't had the opportunity to deeply evaluate the product end-to-end, especially in the past year or so, when I've been less involved with it."
"Incorporating AI could be a potential enhancement in the future."
"Some of the tool's cons include its minimalistic dashboard, which lacks detailed information and control compared to other tools like Jenkins or GitLab. Additionally, it's primarily used by Japanese companies."
"Compared to traditional tools like Jenkins, Tekton lacks a lot of features. It's not efficient in managing conflicts between multiple pipelines."
"The product's documentation is an area of concern, making it an area where improvements are required."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of CircleCI could be less expensive."
"It is entirely open source and free of charge."
"Tekton is an open-source tool."
"The product is free and open-source."
"The product is free of cost."
"The tool is open-source and free to use."
"The solution is open-source."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
University
7%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise22
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about CircleCI?
The solution offers continuous integration and continuous delivery.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CircleCI?
Beware of skyrocketing bills as CircleCI does not provide transparency into how they charge refills. Their monthly billing statement is almost unreadable and their online dashboard doesn't provide ...
What needs improvement with CircleCI?
We've had occasional connectivity issues with cloud resources and build failure due to its own internal system setup and environment. That costs us credits. Support engineers do not thoroughly read...
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...
What do you like most about Tekton?
Its seamless integration with Kubernetes, being built on top of it and utilizing Custom Resource Definitions, ensures a smooth experience within Kubernetes environments exclusively.
What needs improvement with Tekton?
I didn't get the intention of scalability. Scalability means based on the load, it will automatically gain resources and run. The question of pipeline scalability remains unclear. It's quite easy t...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Shopify, Zenefits, Concur Technologies, CyberAgent
The Home Depot, PayPal, Target, HSBC, McKesson, Oncology Venture
Find out what your peers are saying about CircleCI vs. Tekton and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
867,349 professionals have used our research since 2012.