AWS CodePipeline vs Buildkite comparison

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AWS CodePipeline

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

AWS CodePipeline and Buildkite compete in the CI/CD tools category. AWS CodePipeline has the advantage in AWS-centric operations due to its tight integration with AWS services, while Buildkite provides greater flexibility for non-AWS environments.

Features: AWS CodePipeline offers seamless integration with AWS services, flexible configuration, and cost-effectiveness for AWS environments. Buildkite features YAML-based workflow management, efficient Docker caching, and flexibility with self-hosted agents.

Room for Improvement:AWS CodePipeline could enhance cross-cloud compatibility, customization, documentation updates, and build time efficiency. Buildkite may improve scaling for self-hosted agents, error pinpointing, and third-party integrations, along with plugin support and scalability options.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service:AWS CodePipeline is optimized for AWS environments but has room for improvement in support and cross-platform usability. Buildkite, while easy to integrate with various platforms, requires improvements in community support and documentation.

Pricing and ROI:AWS CodePipeline's pay-as-you-go model is more suited for AWS-centric operations but may be costly for extensive builds. In contrast, Buildkite offers cost-effective options for Docker-heavy operations and is more competitive for smaller businesses or non-AWS environments.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS CodePipeline vs. Buildkite Report (Updated: February 2026).

AWS CodePipeline vs. Buildkite

February 2026

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Helped 881,707 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

AWS CodePipeline

Ranking in Build Automation

5th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Buildkite

Ranking in Build Automation

8th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of AWS CodePipeline is 3.2%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Buildkite is 3.1%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
AWS CodePipeline	3.2%
Buildkite	3.1%
Other	93.7%

Build Automation

Featured Reviews

Jeyhun Rashidov

Head of Development at Abyss

Employs advanced deployment strategies and manages CI/CD workflow efficiently

Blue-green deployment has been incredibly beneficial for handling complex deployments in AWS CodePipeline. It allows me to test changes in an isolated environment before deploying them to the entire user base. Additionally, the CI/CD support provided by AWS simplifies the integration process by adding YAML files to projects, enabling AWS to manage the entire CI/CD workflow.

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Raed I.Habib

Senior DevOps Engineer at a newspaper with 5,001-10,000 employees

Easy-to-use and provides good documentation for managing agents

Buildkite has been pushing a lot of effort toward the plugin marketplace and plugin users, especially with the Kubernetes plugin that supports the scalability of agents. The flexibility of some plugins is somewhat limited. In the past, I used to modify the plugins according to my needs. Now, plugins support some sort of configuration or reconfiguration. I would love to see some features added in that direction and the plugin's use. I would like to see some improvements in the hooks implementation. The hooks are amazing and give me a lot of extra flexibility in many of the pipelines, but they're still limited in some areas.

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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

"The product is a one-stop solution that you can use to integrate, deploy and host your application."

"I prefer using CodePipeline and CodeBuild in AWS due to their integration with AWS services, like directly deploying to ECS using Cloud Deploy."

"The product is cost-effective and integrates well with the AWS environment."

"It helps develop CI/CD implementations with centralized management of code building, deployment, and version control."

"The integrations are good."

"The most valuable feature of AWS CodePipeline is the flexibility of the configuration."

"Another big advantage is observability."

"The solution's technical support responds whenever you have an issue, especially whenever you need something sorted out from their side."

More AWS CodePipeline pros

"The solution can be considered as a very well-polished platform with a really great UI."

"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."

"Buildkite allows us to build automations and integration tasks effectively."

"The tool is simple and has no learning curve. If you know YAML, you can master it. It is simple to learn."

"The product's initial setup phase was easy."

"It is a stable solution."

"They have great plugins, scalability, UI, and pipeline options. They also offer webhooks that allow integration with custom setups to send events dynamically."

"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."

More Buildkite pros

Cons

"The support team’s response time must be improved."

"It would be best if AWS CodePipeline provided multiple integration options directly by providing some URLs."

"If there are many dependancies involved in the setup, it may take a long time."

"The solution could improve the documentation. Sometimes we have some issues with the documentation not updating after releasing .NET 6. We had some issues with building the code pipeline, and it was not updating the documentation. It's better to update the code documentation."

"It would be a much better tool if it could be made compatible with other cloud services as well since this is an area the product currently lacks."

"AWS CodePipeline functions well, but there's room for improvement in providing technical support to regular customers who haven't purchased developer support. I mean, having it available for everyone, even if it's not a 24-hour service. It would be more useful if specific support hours were available for assistance."

"If you're talking about multi-cloud, you can't use it."

"While CodePipeline's UI has improved, further enhancements in user experience are necessary to make it more intuitive."

More AWS CodePipeline cons

"I would like to see some improvements in the hooks implementation."

"BuildKite should follow some providers like GitHub Actions. They can offer a shared agent or cloud agent."

"There is a need for rework occasionally, and issues like syntax errors can occur multiple times, especially when manual changes are made in AWS or Amazon Connect that are not captured in the code."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Buildkite cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is manageable."

"The pricing of this solution is dependent upon your needs including how many jobs you daily and how many times the developer will be changing codes and completing deployments."

"AWS CodePipeline is quite affordable. I've been running around four pipelines and the cost is around one dollar per month. It rarely exceeds two dollars."

"I would rate the product's pricing a five out of ten."

"Compared to other cloud services, AWS CodePipeline falls a bit more on the pricey side. I see that the price of the product has been increasing for the past few years."

"The product is quite expensive compared to other solutions."

"AWS charges you based on the number of pipelines you have and how active they are, and I also think that the root account user knows about all the price-related metrics."

"The price of the product depends on how many times you run it. The tool offers a pay-as-you-go model."

More AWS CodePipeline pricing and cost advice

"The solution's per-user pricing model suits huge enterprises but is expensive for small to medium businesses."

"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."

"The self-hosted option is pretty cheap."

"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."

"I don't think the tool is expensive."

"We used the solution’s free version."

"For a business plan, it was 19 USD per month per user."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

11%

Government

Educational Organization

Manufacturing Company

15%

Newspaper

14%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	13
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	7

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	6

Questions from the Community

Which AWS solution would you choose - CodeStar or CodePipeline?

Both AWS solutions deliver solid options, with uniquely different features. AWS CodeStar allows for quick development, building, and deployments of apps. It also provides web application and web se...

What do you like most about AWS CodePipeline?

Code deployment is the best feature.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS CodePipeline?

AWS CodePipeline's pricing is reasonable, and it is not too expensive. I estimated it costs around $5 monthly. On a scale from one to ten, where one is very cheap and ten is very expensive, I would...

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 ...

GitLab vs AWS CodePipeline

Comparisons

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Compared 11% of the time

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Compared 10% of the time

AWS CodeBuild vs AWS CodePipeline

Compared 9% of the time

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GitHub Actions vs Buildkite

Compared 21% of the time

GitLab vs Buildkite

Compared 10% of the time

Harness vs Buildkite

Compared 10% of the time

Tekton vs Buildkite

Compared 10% of the time

EngFlow vs Buildkite

Compared 3% of the time

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Product Reports

Download AWS CodePipeline product report

AWS CodePipeline

January 2026

Download Buildkite product report

January 2026

Also Known As

CodePipeline

No data available

Overview

AWS CodePipeline is a fully managed continuous delivery service that helps you automate your release pipelines for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates. CodePipeline automates the build, test, and deploy phases of your release process every time there is a code change, based on the release model you define. This enables you to rapidly and reliably deliver features and updates. You can easily integrate AWS CodePipeline with third-party services such as GitHub or with your own custom plugin. With AWS CodePipeline, you only pay for what you use. There are no upfront fees or long-term commitments.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Buildkite is a powerful CI/CD tool praised for its scalability and flexibility in automating and managing complex workflows across multiple platforms. Its integration capabilities with various systems and supports for secure, customizable environments enhance development efficiency and data privacy. The feedback highlights significant boosts in productivity and operational cost reduction, making Buildkite a strategic asset for businesses aiming to streamline development tasks and align with organizational goals.

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers

Information Not Available