IBM Rational Build Forge vs Jenkins comparison

IBM and Jenkins are both solutions in the Build Automation category. IBM is ranked #24, while Jenkins is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.2. IBM holds a 1.0% mindshare in BA, compared to Jenkins’s 9.1% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 88% of Jenkins users who would recommend it.

IBM Rational Build Forge

Read 2 IBM Rational Build Forge reviews

414 Views
414 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Jenkins

Read 92 Jenkins reviews

3,539 Views
3,468 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

IBM Rational Build Forge

Jenkins

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

IBM Rational Build Forge and Jenkins compete in automation and build management. Jenkins is favored for its flexibility, open-source nature, and strong community support. IBM Rational Build Forge gains traction with robust enterprise support and integration, appealing to those with IBM ecosystems.

Features: IBM Rational Build Forge integrates with IBM software, offers advanced scheduling, and automation for large enterprises. Jenkins provides a vast array of plugins for customization and extensibility, alongside a strong open-source community that drives improvements and updates. The key distinction is IBM's enterprise-focused features compared to Jenkins's extensive plugin ecosystem and flexibility.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Rational Build Forge offers comprehensive support and structured deployment for enterprises, providing tailored assistance. Jenkins, being open-source, relies on community support, offering varied experiences. IBM's deployment model suits enterprise environments, while Jenkins's approach provides flexibility and adaptability.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Rational Build Forge involves higher setup costs due to its enterprise-level offerings and support services, promising substantial ROI for IBM tool suite users. Jenkins benefits from being open-source, reducing initial costs, leading to quicker ROI through flexibility and community enhancements. Jenkins is cost-effective for smaller to medium-sized enterprises seeking scalable solutions.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Rational Build Forge vs. Jenkins Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Rational Build Forge vs. Jenkins

September 2025

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Helped 867,370 peers since 2012

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

IBM Rational Build Forge

Ranking in Build Automation

24th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Jenkins

Ranking in Build Automation

4th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of IBM Rational Build Forge is 1.0%, down from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jenkins is 9.1%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Jenkins	9.1%
IBM Rational Build Forge	1.0%
Other	89.9%

Build Automation

Featured Reviews

it_user1330545

CRM Program Release Manager at Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center

Great reporting features and very functional

The solution could be more user friendly. Trying to train somebody on it can be difficult. If you're in this field, you kind of learn the tools, but trying to show a PM how to find report sheets to pull data was difficult. I had to show them how to write the queries and pull the data that they needed. It's not a layman's solution. If you're working with a programmer or with an architect, you won't have issues trying to relay how to utilize the tool. It was for those who cut the checks where there were problems enabling them to pull the data they required. I guess the answer is DevOps, but it depends on your environment. Just being able to sign into dashboards and get accurate results was my biggest thing with my PMs on my projects. They like charts and pie graphs, the ability to see things at a glance data where they could make decisions on the fly.

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Annamalai Pts

DevOps Engineer at Tech Mahindra Limited

Streamlined CI/CD pipelines with powerful integration and an easy setup

I use Jenkins as a CI/CD tool. We create pipelines using Jenkins, with stages for Maven builds, Docker image builds, SonarQube integration, and deploying the image to a Kubernetes cluster, AWS EKS Jenkins has made the developers' work very easy. They commit to the remote repository, and…

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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

"All features are useful. Our customer doesn't have any complaints about the tool. It works pretty well for what they want and what they need to do."

"Very good reporting features."

"With Jenkins, the pipeline will take your code from any versioning system like GitHub or Bitbucket. All the security scans can happen in one go and then all the tests also get run. You can just build one container in it and deploy it."

"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."

"The auto-schedule feature is valuable. Another valuable feature is that Jenkins does not trigger a build when there is no change in any of the systems. Jenkins also supports most of the open-source plug-ins."

"Jenkins has excellent task planning features."

"Continuous Integration. Jenkins can integrate with almost any systems used for application development and testing, with its plugins."

"We really appreciate that this solution is plug and play. When coding in the version control system, this product completes the build process automatically."

"Jenkins is stable, user-friendly, and helps with continuous integration. As of today, I can't see any tool that's better than Jenkins."

"Jenkins is very user-friendly."

More Jenkins pros

Cons

"Its logging can be improved. When something goes wrong, it is not always very easy to find the problem. It is hard to identify whether the problem is because of low memory in the server or some configuration in Rational Build Forge. The error logs are not very detailed, and they should provide more information. It should also have more integration with third-party tools. It would be great to have more integration with third-party tools."

"Not user friendly for the layman."

"I do not have any notes for improvement."

"We sometimes face challenges during version upgrades, such as failures when migrating Kubernetes versions."

"Centralized user management would be helpful."

"Tasks such as deployment, cloning, database switchover, and all other database missions and tasks are being done through Jenkins. If a job does not go through, at times the error message does not clearly indicate what caused the failure. I have to escalate it to the Jenkins DevOps team just to see what caused the failure. If the error message is clear, then I wouldn't have to escalate the issue to different teams."

"The major drawback with Jenkins is the lack of support."

"There are a lot of things that they can try to improvise. They can reduce a lot of configurations. It is currently supporting Groovy for scripting. It would be really good if it can be improvised for Python because, for most of the automation, we have Python as a script. It would be good if can also support Python. We have a lot of Android builds. These Android builds can be a part of Jenkins. It can have some plug-ins or configurations for Android builds. There should also be some internal matrix to check the performance. We also want to have more REST API support, which is currently not much in Jenkins. We are not able to get more information about running Jenkins. More REST API support should be provided."

"The UI must be more user-friendly."

"Jenkins could improve the integration with other platforms."

More Jenkins cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"This is an open-source solution for the basic features. However, if an organization wishes to include specific functionality, outside of the basic package, there are extra costs involved."

"It could be cheaper because there are many solutions available in the market. We are paying yearly."

"We are using the free version of Jenkins. There are no costs or licensing."

"Jenkins is an open-source platform."

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

"Jenkins is open-source, so it is free."

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

"Jenkins is an open-source tool."

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

21%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	28
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	56

Questions from the Community

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What do you like most about Jenkins?

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

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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.

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Comparisons

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Compared 28% of the time

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Compared 15% of the time

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Compared 15% of the time

JFrog Pipeline vs Jenkins

Compared 8% of the time

TeamCity vs Jenkins

Compared 8% of the time

GoCD vs Jenkins

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Build Automation

August 2025

Download IBM Rational Build Forge product report

Buyer's Guide

Jenkins

September 2025

Download Jenkins product report

Also Known As

Rational Build Forge

No data available

Overview

IBM Rational Build Forge is an adaptive execution framework that helps automate and standardize the software assembly process. Rational Build Forge helps teams standardize repetitive tasks, improve software quality and manage compliance mandates. This software scales to 25 seats. Rational Build Forge delivers:
Flexibility - gives developers self-service access to preconfigured build processes from within their integrated development environment (IDE). You can add IBM Rational software products to further enhance automation, reporting and integration.
Productivity - accelerates build and release cycles through iterative development, parallel processes and efficient use of hardware.
Compliance - simplifies compliance management with self-documenting audit trails and role-based security.
Compatibility - increases team efficiency with centralized build and release management using the tools you have today.

IBM

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

Cars.com

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

Buyer's Guide

IBM Rational Build Forge vs. Jenkins

September 2025

Free Report: IBM Rational Build Forge vs. Jenkins

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