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 3.1% mindshare in BA, compared to Jenkins’s 7.2% 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

846 Views
829 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Jenkins

Read 92 Jenkins reviews

3,209 Views
3,113 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Buildkite

Jenkins

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

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: February 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite vs. Jenkins

February 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 881,733 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

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 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 Jenkins is 7.2%, down from 11.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Jenkins	7.2%
Buildkite	3.1%
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.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

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

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

"The documentation is quite helpful."

"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."

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

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

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

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

More Buildkite pros

"Jenkins allows us to automate deployment, so I no longer have to do it manually. That's the primary use case. The other advantage of Jenkins is that it's open source. It was free for me to download and install. It's a product that's been in use for many years, so I can find a lot of support online for any issues that I may encounter while configuring anything for a given use case."

"It offers continuous deployment and continuous testing. It enables us to figure out anything."

"This solution has helped us in automating the build and test process, reducing time."

"We used it for all continuous integration parts, like automation testing, deployment, etc."

"The most valuable features of Jenkins are the integration with GitHub, and the automation for deployment."

"I like the business logs. It's a very useful tool. Client-server communication is also very fast."

"Has a good interface, is reliable and saves time."

"The most valuable features of Jenkins are the integration of automatic scripts for testing and the user's ability to use any script."

More Jenkins pros

Cons

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

"It gets very complex if you want the tool to scale automatically."

"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."

More Buildkite cons

"The enterprise version is less stable than the open-source version."

"It would be helpful if they had a bit more interactive UI."

"The disadvantage of Jenkins is writing Groovy scripts. There are other CI tools where you do not need to write this many scripts to manage and deploy."

"I sometimes face a bottleneck when installing the plugins on an offline machine. Mapping the dependencies and then installing the correct sequence of dependencies is a nightmare, and it took me two days to do it."

"For this solution to be a 10, it has to be a lot more stable. Maybe the public version of Jenkins is stable, but in our case it's not stable."

"Jenkins is an open-source solution, and people tend to stay on the same version for a long time. When you look for an answer on Google, you often find something that doesn't relate to your implementation. The plugins are both the aspect of Jenkins and also one of the worst because the plugins can have different versions, so it's hard to figure out how to solve the problems."

"I would like them to provide space for people to have a central node that stores all the logs of workspace information in a distributed fashion to facilitate backup and restoration. Currently, everything is stored on one node, so you need to set up distributed storage or an endpoint that you can use for backing up your information."

"There are a lot of things that they can try to improvise. They can reduce a lot of configurations. It is currently supporting Groovy for scripting. It would be really good if it can be improvised for Python because, for most of the automation, we have Python as a script. It would be good if can also support Python. We have a lot of Android builds. These Android builds can be a part of Jenkins. It can have some plug-ins or configurations for Android builds. There should also be some internal matrix to check the performance. We also want to have more REST API support, which is currently not much in Jenkins. We are not able to get more information about running Jenkins. More REST API support should be provided."

More Jenkins cons

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."

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

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

"The self-hosted option is pretty cheap."

"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."

"Jenkins is a free solution, it is open source."

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

"The solution is one of the lowest costs compared to competitors."

"Jenkins is an open-source tool."

"I used the free OSS version all the time. It was enough for all my needs."

"Jenkins is not expensive and reasonably priced."

"The open-source version is free, but small companies would not be able to afford the cloud-based version."

"The pricing for Jenkins is free."

More Jenkins pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Build Automation solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

881,733 professionals have used our research since 2012.

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…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

15%

Newspaper

14%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

19%

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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 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

JFrog Pipeline vs Buildkite

Compared 4% of the time

More Buildkite Competitors

GitLab vs Jenkins

Compared 12% of the time

Harness vs Jenkins

Compared 7% of the time

TeamCity vs Jenkins

Compared 6% of the time

JFrog Pipeline vs Jenkins

Compared 6% of the time

Tekton vs Jenkins

Compared 6% of the time

More Jenkins Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite

February 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

February 2026

Free Report: Buildkite vs. Jenkins

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

DOWNLOAD NOW

881,733 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Buildkite vs. Jenkins report.

See our list of best Build Automation vendors.

We monitor all Build Automation reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.