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 #3 with an average rating of 8.1. IBM holds a 0.8% mindshare in BA, compared to Jenkins’s 10.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of Jenkins users who would recommend it.

IBM Rational Build Forge

Read 2 IBM Rational Build Forge reviews

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396 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Jenkins

Read 93 Jenkins reviews

3,699 Views
3,625 Comparison Views

87% 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: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Rational Build Forge vs. Jenkins

July 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

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

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 July 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of IBM Rational Build Forge is 0.8%, down from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jenkins is 10.5%, down from 12.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

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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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

"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."

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

"GitHub linking is pretty good. We have a deployment application where we can run our tests and add various variables to be passed as assertions to those tests. This is pretty fluid with Jenkins."

"Jenkins is the most widely used development tool, so there are many plugins and it's easy to integrate. There is a large user base to provide community support, which I find very valuable. If I need to find a better way to do something, I can always get help from the community. Automation is about thinking outside of the box, and other users are constantly adding new plugins."

"The most valuable feature of Jenkins is its continuous deployment. We can deploy to multi-cluster and multi-regions in the cloud."

"Automation of chores like deployment, frequent manual tasks (like running scripts on test and production systems) reduced the time used and the number of errors made by engineers, freeing them to do meaningful work instead."

"Jenkins has a lot of built-in packages and tools."

"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."

"It is open source, flexible, scalable, and easy to use. It is easy to maintain for the administrator. It is a continuous integration tool, and its enterprise version is quite mature. It has good integrations and plug-ins. Azure DevOps can also be integrated with Jenkins."

More Jenkins pros

Cons

"Not user friendly for the layman."

"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."

"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."

"I would like to have an integrated dashboard on top of it and a better UX to look at. The dashboard could be better in terms of integration with other tools. We should be able to have a single pane of glass across all the tools that we use where Jenkins is the pipeline. This can be a very good upgrade to it."

"It would be better if there were an option to remove its Java dependency. This would make it more compatible with other software, and it could be much better. At present, we have to depend on Java whenever we want to deploy agents."

"And I don't care too much for the Jenkins user interface. It's not that user-friendly compared to other solutions available right now. It's not a great user experience. You can do just fine if you are a techie, but it would take a novice some time to learn it and get things done."

"Its schedule builds need improvement. It should have scheduling features in the platform rather than using external plug-ins."

"There are some issues with Jenkins, especially with the SIP job."

"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."

"This solution would be improved with the inclusion of an Artifactory (Universal artifact repository manager)."

More Jenkins cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"The solution is open source."

"It is a free product."

"It is free."

"Jenkins is open source."

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

"It is a cheap solution."

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

"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

22%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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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.

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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

No data available

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Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Build Automation

June 2025

Download IBM Rational Build Forge product report

Buyer's Guide

Jenkins

June 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

July 2025

Free Report: IBM Rational Build Forge vs. Jenkins

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