Buildkite vs GoCD comparison

Buildkite and Thoughtworks are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Buildkite is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.2, while Thoughtworks is ranked #17 with an average rating of 6.5. Buildkite holds a 3.1% mindshare in BA, compared to Thoughtworks’s 2.3% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of Buildkite users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 88% of Thoughtworks users who would recommend it.

Buildkite

Read 14 Buildkite reviews

846 Views
829 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

GoCD

Read 7 GoCD reviews

1,320 Views
752 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Buildkite

GoCD

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

GoCD and Buildkite compete in the continuous integration and delivery space, with Buildkite generally having the advantage due to advanced features, although GoCD is noted for better pricing and support.

Features: GoCD is praised for its visualization capabilities, easy versioned configuration tracking, and comprehensive auditing tools. Buildkite is lauded for elastic scalability, the ability to run pipelines on any infrastructure, and great integration capabilities.

Room for Improvement: GoCD could benefit from an expanded plugin ecosystem, enhanced cloud integration, and streamlined user experience. Buildkite, while strong in many areas, could improve on simplifying its setup process, providing more built-in features without manual configurations, and offering further enhancements to its user interface for better accessibility.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: GoCD's on-premise deployment appeals to organizations wanting internal control and is backed by robust service. Buildkite offers a seamless SaaS deployment experience with minimal maintenance, making it ideal for cloud-based operations, with commendable customer support that efficiently resolves complex queries.

Pricing and ROI: GoCD's open-source nature offers cost-effective pricing, making it appealing to budget-conscious teams with significant ROI. Buildkite, despite higher costs, provides strong ROI through time-saving automation, making it more attractive to larger organizations with complex pipelines.

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

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite vs. GoCD

February 2026

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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

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

GoCD

Ranking in Build Automation

17th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (18th), Release Automation (13th)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Buildkite is 3.1%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of GoCD is 2.3%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Buildkite	3.1%
GoCD	2.3%
Other	94.6%

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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RajeshReddy

Dev Ops Engineer at Infosys

The UI is colorful, but the user experience must be improved

We can see all the pipelines with a simple search. The UI is colorful. The user experience is very rich. The product is very easy to learn if we know a bit of the basics. If we have someone to show us how to use it, it is very easy.

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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

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

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

"The tool's flexibility with pipelines gave us a lot of advantages, especially when managing a huge amount of microservices."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

More Buildkite pros

"The UI is colorful."

"The most notable aspect is its user interface, which we find to be user-friendly and straightforward for deploying and comprehending pipelines. We have the ability to create multiple pipelines, and in addition to that, the resource consumption is impressive."

"GoCD's open-source nature is valuable."

"Permission separations mean that we can grant limited permissions for each team or team member."

Cons

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"Based on the load, the agents can be scaled up and scaled down, and while they are scaling up, sometimes they just get stuck."

"Compared to market leaders like Azure DevOps and Jenkins, Buildkite's community is smaller, but they do have some documentation."

More Buildkite cons

"It is difficult to assign different access levels because it relies on separate keys for developer and admin access, which could be simplified."

"The aspect that requires attention is the user management component. When integrating with BitLabs and authenticating through GitLab, there are specific features we desire. One important feature is the ability to import users directly from GitLab, along with their respective designations, and assign appropriate privileges based on that information. Allocating different privileges to users is a time-consuming process for us."

"The documentation really should be improved by including real examples and more setup cases."

"The tool must be more user-friendly."

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"We used the solution’s free version."

"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."

"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."

"This is an open-source solution and it is inexpensive."

"It's an open-source and free tool."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

15%

Newspaper

14%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

11%

University

10%

Educational Organization

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

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	4
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	3

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 do you like most about GoCD?

The UI is colorful.

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What needs improvement with GoCD?

One area of product improvement is the access control system. It is difficult to assign different access levels because it relies on separate keys for developer and admin access, which could be sim...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for GoCD?

The solution helps us deploy microservices across multiple environments.

See all answers

Comparisons

GitHub Actions vs Buildkite

Compared 22% of the time

GitLab vs Buildkite

Compared 10% of the time

Harness vs Buildkite

Compared 10% of the time

Tekton vs Buildkite

Compared 9% of the time

Jenkins vs Buildkite

Compared 4% of the time

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Bamboo vs GoCD

Compared 8% of the time

GitLab vs GoCD

Compared 8% of the time

Jenkins vs GoCD

Compared 7% of the time

GitHub Actions vs GoCD

Compared 6% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs GoCD

Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite

February 2026

Download Buildkite product report

Buyer's Guide

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites

January 2026

Download GoCD product report

Also Known As

No data available

Adaptive ALM, Thoughtworks Go

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

GoCD is an open source continuous delivery server created by ThoughtWorks. GoCD offers businesses a first-class build and deployment engine for complete control and visibility. It was designed for continuous delivery and the concepts essential to this practice are built in at the core.

Thoughtworks

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Ancestry.com, Barclay Card, AutoTrader, BT Financial Group, Gamesys, Nike, Vodafone, Haufe Lexware, Medidata, Hoovers

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite vs. GoCD

February 2026

Free Report: Buildkite vs. GoCD

Find out what your peers are saying about Buildkite vs. GoCD and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.

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