Buildkite vs Tekton comparison

Buildkite and Google are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Buildkite is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.2, while Google is ranked #2 with an average rating of 7.9. Buildkite holds a 3.1% mindshare in BA, compared to Google’s 7.0% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of Buildkite users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of Google users who would recommend it.

Buildkite

Read 14 Buildkite reviews

846 Views
829 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Tekton

Read 37 Tekton reviews

3,484 Views
3,484 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Buildkite

Tekton

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

Tekton and Buildkite compete in the CI/CD tools category. Tekton has the upper hand for Kubernetes-centric environments due to its serverless architecture and deep integration with Kubernetes, while Buildkite offers a more intuitive approach for workflow management through YAML.

Features: Tekton offers a cloud-native, Kubernetes-driven approach, excelling in customizability, scalability, and support for a variety of tasks within CI/CD pipelines. Its serverless architecture allows for cost-efficient operations with robust orchestration features. Buildkite is noted for intuitive workflow management through YAML files, efficient deployment across private spaces, and Docker integration, enhancing its efficiency in container management.

Room for Improvement: Tekton requires a deep understanding of Kubernetes, presenting challenges in setup for less experienced users. Improvements in storage and cluster-level logging, as well as debugging capabilities, are needed. Buildkite's workflow representation can be complex, and its logging system requires enhancements for smooth error identification. Auto-scalability and third-party tool integration remain areas for significant improvement.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Tekton's deployment is bolstered by Red Hat support, significantly benefiting on-premise and hybrid cloud environments with OpenShift. Although its open-source nature leans towards community reliance, documentation can be improved. Buildkite predominantly supports public cloud settings, making deployment straightforward, yet it lacks direct customer service as compared to Tekton's environment.

Pricing and ROI: Tekton's alignment with Kubernetes offers cost benefits, optimizing resources in Kubernetes clusters and eliminating licensing fees, making it ideal for cost-conscious environments. Buildkite's per-user pricing offers cost-effectiveness for larger enterprises but can be pricier for smaller ones. Its self-hosted option and integration with cloud platforms deliver substantial ROI by boosting deployment efficiency and productivity.

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

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite vs. Tekton

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

Tekton

Ranking in Build Automation

2nd

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

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 Tekton is 7.0%, down from 12.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Tekton	7.0%
Buildkite	3.1%
Other	89.9%

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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reviewer2741265

Software engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Benefit from a smooth learning curve and efficient adaptability

After seeing Jenkins and Tekton, I think Tekton is quite built on top of Kubernetes, so the learning curve is minimal. If you are working with Kubernetes, then OpenShift created Tekton on top of that, making it easily adaptable. Tekton is highly customizable. With Kubernetes, we can customize on our own and create custom builders. If teams have time and want to make enhancements, they can do it themselves. Whatever OpenShift is providing regarding Tekton is sufficient. It is easy to use because we don't need to write every pod step every time. A proper DevOps engineer can help once or twice, and development teams can easily adapt to that, make small shell script changes in the steps, understand the process, and work with it.

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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."

"It is a stable solution."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

More Buildkite pros

"The platform's most valuable feature is its cloud-native and Kubernetes-ready design."

"The 'promote' feature is beneficial as it simplifies deployment processes by allowing easy promotion of applications to different environments without needing to re-run CI/CD processes."

"Tekton is serverless and runs on OpenShift, and we leverage Tekton to take full advantage of the Kubernetes features such as running and scaling the solution in PaaS."

"Tekton's inclusion in Kubernetes deployment offers better visibility on how Tekton is performing within a cluster. It is lightweight and not as heavy as Jenkins to maintain."

"Its seamless integration with Kubernetes, being built on top of it and utilizing Custom Resource Definitions, ensures a smooth experience within Kubernetes environments exclusively."

"I find it beneficial to show data from Tekton to another GitHub or Bitbucket pipeline."

"Tekton provides a feature where you can schedule the job."

"Tekton has a user interface that facilitates time savings, making it more user-friendly than Jenkins."

More Tekton pros

Cons

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

More Buildkite cons

"Tekton is a good product with all the features I need. There isn't anything that needs improvement."

"The stability issues can be there."

"Tekton should have more accessibility for some rare use cases so that we can have more references when applying some techniques to our pipeline."

"For infrastructure deployment, integration is somewhat complex, especially when using Terraform with Tekton. It would be beneficial if this process were simplified."

"The product's documentation is an area of concern, making it an area where improvements are required."

"Configuring Tekton requires a deep understanding of Kubernetes, which can be difficult for developers."

"Some of the tool's cons include its minimalistic dashboard, which lacks detailed information and control compared to other tools like Jenkins or GitLab. Additionally, it's primarily used by Japanese companies."

"The product's scalability can be challenging when multiple users access it simultaneously."

More Tekton cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"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."

"It is entirely open source and free of charge."

"Tekton is an open-source tool."

"The solution is open-source."

"The product is free and open-source."

"The product is free of cost."

"The tool is open-source and free to use."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

15%

Newspaper

14%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

22%

Manufacturing Company

11%

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	11
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	22

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 needs improvement with Tekton?

I didn't get the intention of scalability. Scalability means based on the load, it will automatically gain resources and run. The question of pipeline scalability remains unclear. It's quite easy t...

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What is your primary use case for Tekton?

We use Tekton for build and deployments. For LMP testing, we use the Tekton pipeline. We also use GitHub CI/CD. For infrastructure pipelines and Infrastructure as Code (IaC), we use Tekton. Previou...

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Comparisons

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Compared 8% of the time

Nx vs Buildkite

Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 25% of the time

GitLab vs Tekton

Compared 24% of the time

Jenkins vs Tekton

Compared 7% of the time

Harness vs Tekton

Compared 7% of the time

AWS CodePipeline vs Tekton

Compared 3% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite

February 2026

Download Buildkite product report

Buyer's Guide

Tekton

January 2026

Download Tekton 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

Tekton is a powerful yet flexible Kubernetes-native open-source framework for creating continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) systems. It lets you build, test, and deploy across multiple cloud providers or on-premises systems by abstracting away the underlying implementation details.

Google

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

The Home Depot, PayPal, Target, HSBC, McKesson, Oncology Venture

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite vs. Tekton

February 2026

Free Report: Buildkite vs. Tekton

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