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Buildkite vs Tekton comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

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
16th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Tekton
Ranking in Build Automation
4th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Buildkite is 3.3%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tekton is 4.3%, down from 11.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Build Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Tekton4.3%
Buildkite3.3%
Other92.4%
Build Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Hamza AlZa'Atreh - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. DevOps Engineer at Bank aletihad
Have great plugins, pipeline options and offer webhooks for integration
BuildKite should follow some providers like GitHub Actions. They can offer a shared agent or cloud agent. If you have some builds that don't require a private environment or support data, you can use their shared data. For example, with Buildkite, I can use self-hosted agents running on my infrastructure and public shared agents. I will pay for the production minutes used as the production agent. For instance, if my job runs for ten minutes, I will be charged for ten minutes of usage.
reviewer2741265 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Buildkite allows us to build automations and integration tasks effectively."
"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."
"Buildkite's UI is particularly intuitive, making it simple to add steps to your pipeline. It also provides detailed logging."
"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."
"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 product's initial setup phase was easy."
"It is a stable solution."
"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 most valuable aspect is its compatibility with the cloud-native environment. It can be easily installed on Kubernetes and leverages its resources to run CI/CD pipelines."
"Tekton is an orchestrator. It provides seamless integration for our pipelines. It offers robust support for executing tasks within the pipeline, allowing us to set up and run pipelines quickly."
"The tool offers flexibility and compatibility."
"Tekton is a cloud-native solution. It offers optimal resource consumption, allowing tasks to be run more efficiently and at a lower cost."
"Tekton is highly customizable, with Kubernetes, we can customize on our own and create custom builders."
"The installation process is seamless, requiring fewer resources compared to Jenkins."
"I like the branching and visualization tools for the pipeline."
"You can isolate most Tekton assets in the Kubernetes namespace for your feature branch. This allows you to freely change Tekton assets and objects to adapt to your feature branch and requirements."
 

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."
"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."
"Compared to market leaders like Azure DevOps and Jenkins, Buildkite's community is smaller, but they do have some documentation."
"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."
"It gets very complex if you want the tool to scale automatically."
"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 product must provide better integration with other tools."
"Initially, working with YAML configuration can be challenging using the solution."
"Tekton lacks integration capabilities compared to other CI/CD tools like Jenkins and Travis."
"The user interface of Tekton could be improved."
"If you are a beginner, then accessing the flexibility part can be overwhelming. We think the learning curve of the tool is steep, especially for those who are not already familiar with Kubernetes."
"Improvement is needed in the build step."
"Tekton is easy to use, but updating from older versions can be challenging due to method changes with each release."
"The product's documentation is an area of concern, making it an area where improvements are required."
"When we started with Tekton around 2021 or early 2022, the community support was somewhat limited, which posed challenges when dealing with issues or debugging. We had to rely on Red Hat OpenShift support to overcome these challenges. However, I believe that these issues will naturally improve over timeas the developer community grows stronger. From a technical perspective, I haven't had the opportunity to deeply evaluate the product end-to-end, especially in the past year or so, when I've been less involved with it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's per-user pricing model suits huge enterprises but is expensive for small to medium businesses."
"I don't think the tool is expensive."
"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 self-hosted option is pretty cheap."
"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."
"We used the solution’s free version."
"For a business plan, it was 19 USD per month per user."
"The tool is open-source and free to use."
"It is entirely open source and free of charge."
"The product is free of cost."
"The product is free and open-source."
"The solution is open-source."
"Tekton is an open-source tool."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Outsourcing Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
University
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise23
 

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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
The Home Depot, PayPal, Target, HSBC, McKesson, Oncology Venture
Find out what your peers are saying about Buildkite vs. Tekton and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.