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GitHub Actions vs Jenkins 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

GitHub Actions
Ranking in Build Automation
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
22
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
92
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of GitHub Actions is 11.4%, up from 7.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jenkins is 10.3%, down from 12.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Build Automation
 

Featured Reviews

MuhammadAzhar Khan - PeerSpot reviewer
Integration with various environments and cloud providers enhances automation
I use GitHub Actions for CI/CD pipelines. I automate infrastructure, deployment, and all processes. Most companies use CI/CD pipelines, and GitHub Actions is one of the tools available for this purpose The most valuable feature of GitHub Actions is that it is completely free. It can be integrated…
Annamalai Pts - PeerSpot reviewer
Streamlined CI/CD pipelines with powerful integration and an easy setup
I use Jenkins as a CI/CD tool. We create pipelines using Jenkins, with stages for Maven builds, Docker image builds, SonarQube integration, and deploying the image to a Kubernetes cluster, AWS EKS Jenkins has made the developers' work very easy. They commit to the remote repository, and…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"GitHub Actions is valuable for its ease of use and integration."
"Creating workflows in YAML format is straightforward and easy to comprehend. This includes both understanding and writing workflows. Additionally, the downloading aspect for third-party instances can also be easily done. It's worth noting that vulnerability analysis and similar tasks should be part of our automation through data workflows. Furthermore, we can break down our processes step by step, starting from building, then moving on to analysis, testing, and finally deploying in production and the clear environment. All of these tasks can be efficiently managed within this platform."
"It is a very stable solution as we have not faced any issues."
"I find the automation feature of GitHub Actions most valuable for our building processes. It integrates seamlessly with GitHub, so there's no extra configuration needed, making the building process easy and efficient. GitHub Actions handles scalability well, automatically managing execution infrastructure without requiring additional configurations. We haven't yet explored GitHub Actions' support for AI projects, as we haven't used its AI capabilities."
"The product's most beneficial feature is the ability to create workflows within the solution."
"GitHub Actions is a beautiful tool that integrates smoothly with all major tools, reducing CI/CD work by 30% to 40%."
"The solution has saved us approximately 20% in terms of efficiency and productivity."
"The most valuable features of GitHub Actions include its seamless integration within GitHub, which simplifies the CI/CD pipeline setup. The scalability of using different types of runners—both public and private runners—enhances deployment flexibility."
"Different types of jobs, such as Pipeline, Build, Freestyle, Maven, etc."
"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."
"We really appreciate that this solution is plug and play. When coding in the version control system, this product completes the build process automatically."
"It has a lot of community posts and support."
"The solution is scalable and concurrent users have access to the platform."
"The simplicity of Jenkins and the evolving ecosystem of Jenkins are most valuable. Today, you do not have to write a pipeline from scratch. The library functionality of Jenkins helps you to bring all those in ready-made, and you also get the best practices for them. That is a great feature of Jenkins, and that is why it is being used significantly."
"It is easy to use."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its integration between different tools."
 

Cons

"The solution's integration capabilities and UI are areas of concern where improvement is required to make the product more user-friendly."
"Improvements could be made in terms of time-saving capabilities and resolving potential complexities in centralized workflows."
"The minor drawback of GitHub Actions is the management of the dashboard and pipeline runs, which needs improvement. The dashboard for running pipelines could be better."
"The reporting capabilities are somewhat limited."
"GitHub sometimes makes it difficult to debug actions."
"In terms of improvements, I think better logging for debugging purposes would be helpful, especially for complex workflows."
"The main improvement would be to add support for more programming languages and frameworks."
"GitHub Actions lacks a feature for automating the build process for mobile applications."
"Performance-wise. This needs to be improved. Not only performance-wise, some functionality or some features can be added to Jenkins."
"Jenkins can sometimes run slow, especially when restarting after a plugin installation or when returning from a pipeline view to the dashboard."
"I would like to see even more integrations included in the next release."
"There are some issues with Jenkins, especially with the SIP job."
"Jenkins should adopt the Pipeline as Code approach by building a deployment pipeline using the Jenkins file."
"Better and easy-to-use integration with Docker would be an improvement."
"Jenkins can improve by continuing to add additional plugins for all the new solutions that are coming out within the cloud sphere."
"The bug fix speed is very slow."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's price is okay and reasonable."
"It's low-priced. Not high, but definitely low."
"Regarding cost, as an enterprise, we negotiate our license and expenses, so I can't provide a specific rating for that."
"The product is slightly more expensive than some alternatives."
"The cost for GitHub Actions may be around $45 dollars per user."
"Price-wise, GitHub Actions is okay. If I want to use the product's advanced features, then I need to pay the licensing charges for the solution."
"It is free and open platform, so I would rate it 1 out of 10."
"For our basic usage, we didn't have to pay."
"Jenkins is open source and free."
"I used the free OSS version all the time. It was enough for all my needs."
"Jenkins is open source."
"Jenkins is a free open-source server."
"Jenkins is an open-source platform."
"We are using the free version of Jenkins. There is not a license required to use the solution because it is open-source."
"It's free software with a big community behind it, which is very good."
"The open-source version is free, but small companies would not be able to afford the cloud-based version."
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Comparison Review

it_user184734 - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about GitHub Actions?
I have optimized job execution time by running test scripts in parallel and creating multiple pipelines; we've significantly reduced execution times. What could take 50 minutes can be cut down to j...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for GitHub Actions?
I would rate pricing a seven, which leans toward the expensive side. However, there is still value for money, and that's why we continue using it.
What needs improvement with GitHub Actions?
Frankly, I cannot imagine something that could be improved in GitHub Actions; there's a lot of capabilities, and the feature set is more advanced than we use. The pricing is high for the advanced s...
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 do you like most about Jenkins?
Jenkins has been instrumental in automating our build and deployment processes.
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.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Airial, Clarus Financial Technology, cubetutor, Metawidget, mysocio, namma, silverpeas, Sokkva, So Rave, tagzbox
Find out what your peers are saying about GitHub Actions vs. Jenkins and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.