Buildkite vs CircleCI comparison

Buildkite and CircleCI are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Buildkite is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.2, while CircleCI is ranked #13 with an average rating of 7.0. Buildkite holds a 2.8% mindshare in BA, compared to CircleCI’s 3.5% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of Buildkite users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 75% of CircleCI users who would recommend it.

Buildkite

Read 14 Buildkite reviews

710 Views
696 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

CircleCI

Read 7 CircleCI reviews

1,060 Views
1,039 Comparison Views

75% willing to recommend

Buildkite

CircleCI

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 11, 2025

CircleCI and Buildkite are competing in the continuous integration and delivery space. CircleCI has an advantage in flexibility and cloud-based solutions, while Buildkite excels in infrastructure capabilities.

Features: CircleCI provides a range of integrations, a strong focus on automation, and ease of use, which is beneficial for teams adopting modern CI/CD practices. Buildkite offers superior control through its hybrid architecture, support for on-premise deployments, and advanced customization options.

Room for Improvement: CircleCI could enhance its support for complex on-premises requirements and improve personalized customer service. Buildkite might address its higher upfront costs and steep initial learning curve and expand its documentation for better user onboarding.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: CircleCI's cloud-centric deployment simplifies setup but poses challenges for on-premises needs. Its customer service is efficient but automated. Buildkite offers controlled deployment with extensive on-premises support and personalized customer service.

Pricing and ROI: CircleCI's pricing is flexible, catering to various team sizes with its scalable cloud solutions, delivering quick returns due to lower initial investment. Buildkite's higher initial setup costs offer justified value for enterprises needing tailored infrastructure solutions, emphasizing long-term ROI through extensive customization.

To learn more, read our detailed Buildkite vs. CircleCI Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite vs. CircleCI

December 2025

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Helped 881,082 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

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

CircleCI

Ranking in Build Automation

13th

Average Rating

6.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

AI Software Development (200th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Buildkite is 2.8%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CircleCI is 3.5%, up from 3.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Buildkite	2.8%
CircleCI	3.5%
Other	93.7%

Build Automation

Featured Reviews

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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RahulArora

Global Head - DevOps and AIOps Startegist at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Automated CI/CD pipelines have transformed deployment speed and collaboration for my teams

CircleCI offers fast parallel builds, easy integration with GitHub, and the ability to deploy applications on Kubernetes pods, which are amazing features. Fast parallel builds and GitHub integration have definitely helped my team reach faster time to market for our applications. Previously, our deployment used to take a couple of hours when doing it manually, but with CircleCI pipeline, our hours-long job has been converted to a couple of minutes. Its simplicity, fast pipeline execution, and strong GitHub and GitLab integrations are definitely unique advantages I discovered while using CircleCI. Time saved is one of the key aspects I have seen since using CircleCI. I have noticed fewer deployment errors, and it has helped me with easy debugging. Time saved is directly proportional to the cost and effort saved. CircleCI has positively impacted my organization by integrating directly with my Git repositories as a fully managed SaaS platform. CircleCI has a great impact on my team's collaboration and communication, with around 25 to 40 developers and DevOps engineers using it daily across multiple repositories and environments, helping us use it at scale. CircleCI has significantly increased our release frequency and deployment speed compared to before I started using it. CircleCI improves security for my organization by enforcing automated checks in the pipeline and securely managing secrets through environment variables while providing auditable deployments. CircleCI integrates seamlessly with my DevOps toolchain by connecting directly to GitHub, container registries, and my cloud platform AWS, allowing the entire CI/CD flow from code commit to deployment and monitoring with minimal manual effort.

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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

"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."

"You don't have to set up an agent in Buildkite like in Jenkins."

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

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

"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."

"Buildkite's UI is particularly intuitive, making it simple to add steps to your pipeline. It also provides detailed logging."

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

"It is a stable solution."

More Buildkite pros

"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 solution offers continuous integration and continuous delivery."

"It's a stable product."

"Some of the most valuable features include container-based builds, integration with Bit Bucket and being able to store artifacts."

"The automation workflow in CircleCI related to third-party applications is very good and allows standardization of applications."

"Enables us to detect exactly which build failed and why, and to push multiple builds to our production environment at a very fast rate."

"CircleCI has positively impacted the organization, as it has been used for many years and serves as the main source for application deployment."

"CircleCI has significantly reduced build and deployment times, saving substantial engineering hours and effort for me, which has directly improved my productivity and release velocity, reflecting incredible ROI."

Cons

"The solution should offer more options for installing an agent and give users the option of having a separate self-hosted or provisioned agent."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"The product must provide better integration with other tools."

More Buildkite cons

"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."

"Billing is a mess."

"There needs to be some improvement in the user interface of CircleCI."

"The solution’s pricing could be better."

"A return on investment with CircleCI has not been observed, and no relevant metrics such as time saved or fewer employees needed can be shared."

"I believe debugging complex pipelines and managing credits can sometimes be challenging, especially for large workflows, so these areas can be improved."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

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

"We used the solution’s free version."

"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."

"The self-hosted option is pretty cheap."

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

"The price of CircleCI could be less expensive."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

17%

Newspaper

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

16%

University

10%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	5

Questions from the Community

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...

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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...

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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 ...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CircleCI?

There is not much experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing because that is managed by the legal team.

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What needs improvement with CircleCI?

CircleCI's Orbs are not as easy to use as they could be. If CircleCI implemented a function approach similar to GitHub Actions, it would be significantly better. CircleCI could be improved if it co...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering CircleCI?

For others looking into using CircleCI, study thoroughly about CircleCI's Orbs because they are quite complicated. The overall review rating for CircleCI is 6 out of 10.

See all answers

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Compared 7% of the time

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Compared 13% of the time

GitLab vs CircleCI

Compared 10% of the time

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Compared 9% of the time

TeamCity vs CircleCI

Compared 9% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite

January 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Build Automation

January 2026

Download CircleCI product report

Overview

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.

Buildkite

CircleCI is a continuous integration and delivery platform that automates software development, streamlining the process for engineers and developers. It's valued for its ability to enhance development speed while maintaining high software quality.

Known for its robust CI/CD capabilities, CircleCI supports a wide range of programming languages and integrations, allowing teams to build and deploy code with efficiency and reliability. Its flexibility and automation features help teams quickly adapt to changing project requirements. CircleCI's cloud-based architecture ensures scalability and accessibility, making it an attractive option for modern development environments.

What are CircleCI's key features?

Continuous Integration: Automates code integration with testing to catch errors early.
Continuous Deployment: Simplifies the process of deploying code to production environments.
Customizable Workflows: Offers flexibility in defining build, test, and deployment stages.
Parallel Execution: Speeds up builds by running multiple tasks at once.
VCS Integration: Seamlessly integrates with platforms like GitHub and Bitbucket.

What benefits can users expect when using CircleCI?

Increased Efficiency: Streamlines development workflows, reducing the time to market.
Improved Code Quality: Early error detection through automation increases overall quality.
Scalability: Ability to handle growing workloads as development needs evolve.
Enhanced Collaboration: Facilitates teamwork through shared visibility and control over development processes.

In tech-driven industries, CircleCI enables efficient software development pipelines. Its ability to run automated tests and manage deployments effectively is particularly beneficial in fast-paced, innovation-driven fields like fintech, mobile app development, and SaaS platforms. Offering tools that meet high-demand environments, it supports teams in delivering timely and quality software products.

CircleCI

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Shopify, Zenefits, Concur Technologies, CyberAgent

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite vs. CircleCI

December 2025

Free Report: Buildkite vs. CircleCI

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