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 2.8% mindshare in BA, compared to Google’s 7.9% 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

710 Views
696 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Tekton

Read 37 Tekton reviews

3,473 Views
3,473 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Buildkite

Tekton

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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: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite vs. Tekton

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

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 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 Tekton is 7.9%, down from 12.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Tekton	7.9%
Buildkite	2.8%
Other	89.3%

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

"The documentation is quite helpful."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

More Buildkite pros

"It is an open-source tool, which makes it highly adaptable."

"One of the best things I appreciate is that Tekton runs on the Kubernetes platform. This is very useful when working on a project with other team members. For instance, suppose we have a very big project that requires building a large amount of source code or running many unit tests. During the build and unit test phases, Tekton on Kubernetes allows us to have a scalable machine to handle these tasks. This scalability is the most useful aspect for me."

"The platform's most valuable feature is its wireless capability, which makes installation easy and sets up the flow."

"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."

"It enables enterprises to build a flexible framework atop Tekton, making it easier to define workflows with standard inputs and outputs."

"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."

"It scales automatically based on the number of tasks or pipelines running, which is efficient and effective for our development needs."

"When you run a pipeline, all the jobs are called. It is a very valuable feature that enhances job maintenance overall."

More Tekton pros

Cons

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

More Buildkite cons

"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."

"Tekton lacks sufficient documentation"

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

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

"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."

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

"Tekton lacks integration capabilities compared to other CI/CD tools like Jenkins and Travis."

"The question of pipeline scalability remains unclear."

More Tekton cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We used the solution’s free version."

"The self-hosted option is pretty cheap."

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

"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."

"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."

"Tekton is an open-source tool."

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

"The product is free of cost."

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

"The solution is open-source."

"The product is free and open-source."

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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

22%

Manufacturing Company

12%

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 23% of the time

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Compared 12% of the time

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Compared 12% of the time

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Compared 9% of the time

CircleCI vs Buildkite

Compared 7% of the time

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GitHub Actions vs Tekton

Compared 27% 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 2% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite

January 2026

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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

December 2025

Free Report: Buildkite vs. Tekton

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