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Buildkite pros and cons

Vendor: Buildkite
4.1 out of 5

Pros & Cons summary

Buyer's Guide

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Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Highly scalable and efficient CI/CD pipeline management
Customizable build environments 
Supportive and responsive customer service

CONS

Limited built-in support for Windows
Complex pricing model 
Some users find the documentation lacking 
 

Buildkite Pros review quotes

Anoop Suvarna - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant-Devops(AWS & Azure) at Genpact - Headstrong
May 25, 2024
You don't have to set up an agent in Buildkite like in Jenkins.
TP
Tech Architect at Provar
May 27, 2024
Buildkite's UI is particularly intuitive, making it simple to add steps to your pipeline. It also provides detailed logging.
Pieter Geelen - PeerSpot reviewer
Freelancer at geelen.io ·
Jun 4, 2024
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.
Learn what your peers think about Buildkite. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Purushotham S - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineering Manager(QA)/ Release Manager at Esper
Jun 6, 2024
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.
AR
Senior Automation Testing Engineer at Nous Infosystems
Jun 11, 2024
Using Buildkite, it's much easier to manage pipelines. It's straightforward to understand what each pipeline returns, making it easy to edit configurations, such as passwords. Although there is a steep learning curve initially, the overall process is still comprehensible. Additionally, Buildkite offers features like hooks and triggers; for example, an action in the app can automatically trigger a pipeline. These elements can be added to specific pipelines, ensuring the entire process is automated.
AmitKumar41 - PeerSpot reviewer
Member of Technical Staff at VMware by Broadcom
Jun 10, 2024
The documentation is quite helpful.
Jaskaran Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Specialist at Techn IT Solutions
Jun 13, 2024
The solution can be considered as a very well-polished platform with a really great UI.
Sannihith Kavala - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior SRE at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
Jun 14, 2024
It is a stable solution.
Prabin Silwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Engineering Consultant at ASSURANCE IQ, INC.
Jun 24, 2024
The product's initial setup phase was easy.
Raed I.Habib - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior DevOps Engineer at a newspaper with 5,001-10,000 employees
Jun 29, 2024
The tool's flexibility with pipelines gave us a lot of advantages, especially when managing a huge amount of microservices.
 

Buildkite Cons review quotes

Anoop Suvarna - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant-Devops(AWS & Azure) at Genpact - Headstrong
May 25, 2024
The solution should offer more options for installing an agent and give users the option of having a separate self-hosted or provisioned agent.
TP
Tech Architect at Provar
May 27, 2024
Compared to market leaders like Azure DevOps and Jenkins, Buildkite's community is smaller, but they do have some documentation.
Pieter Geelen - PeerSpot reviewer
Freelancer at geelen.io ·
Jun 4, 2024
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.
Learn what your peers think about Buildkite. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Purushotham S - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineering Manager(QA)/ Release Manager at Esper
Jun 6, 2024
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.
AR
Senior Automation Testing Engineer at Nous Infosystems
Jun 11, 2024
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.
AmitKumar41 - PeerSpot reviewer
Member of Technical Staff at VMware by Broadcom
Jun 10, 2024
The product must provide better integration with other tools.
Jaskaran Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Specialist at Techn IT Solutions
Jun 13, 2024
It gets very complex if you want the tool to scale automatically.
Sannihith Kavala - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior SRE at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
Jun 14, 2024
Based on the load, the agents can be scaled up and scaled down, and while they are scaling up, sometimes they just get stuck.
Prabin Silwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Engineering Consultant at ASSURANCE IQ, INC.
Jun 24, 2024
My company has had problems with the tool's parallel running and execution time. The testing framework also has some limitations. The tool cannot do everything.
Raed I.Habib - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior DevOps Engineer at a newspaper with 5,001-10,000 employees
Jun 29, 2024
I would like to see some improvements in the hooks implementation.