Buildkite vs Jenkins comparison

Buildkite and Jenkins are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Buildkite is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.2, while Jenkins is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.1. Buildkite holds a 2.8% mindshare in BA, compared to Jenkins’s 7.5% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of Buildkite users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 88% of Jenkins users who would recommend it.

Buildkite

Read 14 Buildkite reviews

710 Views
696 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Jenkins

Read 92 Jenkins reviews

3,005 Views
2,945 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Buildkite

Jenkins

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

Jenkins and Buildkite compete in the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) space. While both offer robust platforms, Jenkins has the upper hand with its extensive plugin support, offering greater flexibility and customization.

Features: Jenkins provides extensive plugin support, flexibility, and scalability, allowing users to build pipelines and integrate with various tools. Buildkite offers ease in workflow management through YAML configurations, effective caching mechanisms for Docker containers, and a streamlined deployment process.

Room for Improvement: Jenkins could enhance its interface for a modern look and improve the stability and usability of less common plugins. Specific issues exist with some plugins and integration with certain systems like Docker. Buildkite needs better third-party integration, improved plugin flexibility, and faster resolution of scalability concerns.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Jenkins supports on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments, offering flexibility but can be complex to set up initially. Its strong community support is vast due to its open-source nature, though official customer support is limited. Buildkite primarily operates in the public cloud environment, providing simpler deployment for cloud-native setups. Both benefit from strong community support, but Jenkins's open-source model promotes more community-driven solutions, whereas Buildkite’s commercial model offers a more unified customer experience.

Pricing and ROI: Jenkins is free and open-source, making it cost-effective for businesses investing in setup and maintenance. It offers a significant ROI through improved productivity and reduced operational costs via automation. Buildkite's pricing is user-based and may be more accessible in terms of initial and ongoing costs, which is beneficial for teams using cloud solutions for deployment.

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

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite vs. Jenkins

December 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

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

Jenkins

Ranking in Build Automation

4th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

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 Jenkins is 7.5%, down from 11.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Jenkins	7.5%
Buildkite	2.8%
Other	89.7%

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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Jamshaid I

Principal Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Efficient resource allocation and robust workflow with autoscaling capabilities

In Kubernetes, we use node-based architecture with nodes and pods and follow practices like RBAC and rollback. Multiple pods can run concurrently. We benefit from Kubernetes' ability to autoscale pods and use horizontal pod autoscalers to adjust the number of pods based on metrics like CPU or memory usage, ensuring efficient resource allocation and stability under load.

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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

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

"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."

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

"The documentation is quite helpful."

"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."

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

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

More Buildkite pros

"Jenkins is stable, user-friendly, and helps with continuous integration. As of today, I can't see any tool that's better than 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."

"We really appreciate that this solution is plug and play. When coding in the version control system, this product completes the build process automatically."

"Jenkins is particularly valuable since it saves time by automating manual tasks."

"We can schedule anything with Jenkins, which is useful for deployment or anything that requires scheduling. It also has multiple plugins we can use for Maven, JUnit, etc."

"Jenkins is very user-friendly."

"It is easy to use."

"Jenkins integrates with multiple tools like Bitbucket and makes life easier. We don't have to write a lot of code since a lot of libraries are available."

More Jenkins pros

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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

More Buildkite cons

"Improvement-wise, I would want the solution's user interface to be changed for the better. In short, the solution can be made more user-friendly."

"Jenkins could improve in areas related to Kubernetes and Docker container integration, like machine allocation of nodes and Marshaling integration improvements."

"There is no way for the cloud repositories to trigger Jenkins."

"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."

"Centralized user management would be helpful."

"The learning curve is quite steep at the moment."

"They need to improve their documentation."

"Sometimes you have Jenkins restarting because of OOM errors."

More Jenkins cons

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."

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

"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."

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

"We used the solution’s free version."

"The self-hosted option is pretty cheap."

"Jenkins is open source."

"We use the tool's open-source version which is free. There is an enterprise version which is expensive but comes with better support."

"It is an open source."

"Jenkins is an open-source platform."

"The tool is open-source."

"In our company, we do pay for the licensing of the solution."

"Jenkins is open source and free."

"We are using the free version of Jenkins. There is not a license required to use the solution because it is open-source."

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

Manufacturing Company

17%

Newspaper

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

20%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Computer Software Company

Government

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	28
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	56

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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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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

Comparisons

GitHub Actions vs Buildkite

Compared 23% of the time

GitLab vs Buildkite

Compared 12% of the time

Harness vs Buildkite

Compared 12% of the time

Tekton vs Buildkite

Compared 11% of the time

TeamCity vs Buildkite

Compared 4% of the time

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GitLab vs Jenkins

Compared 12% of the time

Harness vs Jenkins

Compared 8% of the time

TeamCity vs Jenkins

Compared 7% of the time

Tekton vs Jenkins

Compared 7% of the time

JFrog Pipeline vs Jenkins

Compared 7% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite

January 2026

Download Buildkite product report

Buyer's Guide

Jenkins

January 2026

Download Jenkins 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

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

Information Not Available

Airial, Clarus Financial Technology, cubetutor, Metawidget, mysocio, namma, silverpeas, Sokkva, So Rave, tagzbox

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite vs. Jenkins

December 2025

Free Report: Buildkite vs. Jenkins

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