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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
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Jenkins
Ranking in Build Automation
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
93
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of GitHub Actions is 11.1%, up from 4.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jenkins is 10.4%, down from 13.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Build Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Muzammil Riaz - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers version control, automated script execution and reduces manual efforts
Its integration and deployment are quite easy. You need to create a YAML file in your project, detailing configurations within this file. It integrates itself, requiring you to specify titles, descriptions, parameters, and a trigger scheduler if needed. Apart from that, it's just a simple YAML file, so there's no need for complex configurations. In one project, I used GitHub to automate an application related to email marketing, focusing on actions for data scraping. This required running scripts daily, sometimes even twice or thrice a day. Manually executing these scripts is inefficient and overly reliant on individual team members. However, by integrating the project with GitHub Actions, we automated script execution. Triggers were set up to initiate the pipeline automatically with every new commit or push to a branch. Additionally, we implemented schedulers to run pipelines at predetermined times, like 9 PM or 2 PM. Another enhancement was executing five tests in parallel through data actions, making the process more robust. GitHub Actions also offers stepwise execution details, greatly aiding in understanding and managing workflows. 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 just 8 to 10 minutes through these optimizations.
Dinesh-Patil - PeerSpot reviewer
A highly-scalable and stable solution that reduces deployment time and produces a significant return on investment
The dashboard needs to be improved. Though the access management and authentication functionalities are present, the dashboard and UI could be more user-friendly. The product has many plug-ins. Users have to go through the documentation to be able to use the product. The UI must be more user-friendly. The information should be available in the dashboard itself. The users shouldn’t have to refer to the documentation. When a user hovers over the elements on the dashboard, it should reveal information about them.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I am familiar with the entire life cycle of the product."
"GitHub Actions is valuable for its ease of use and integration."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is a good product that offers stability and performance."
"It improves efficiency as it involves no downtime and is managed by GitHub."
"The most valuable feature of GitHub Actions is the ability to automate various tasks, such as backups and deployments, to ease the development workflow."
"GitHub Actions helps automate the deployment process, eliminating manual copying and testing, which saves time and minimizes errors."
"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 just 8 to 10 minutes through these optimizations."
"The solution has saved us approximately 20% in terms of efficiency and productivity."
"Jenkins can be used for elastic management, if you have any sensitive data or credentials you can use them across the environment. Additionally, the solution is easy to use and can be used across multiple use cases."
"This is a great integration tool and very powerful."
"The solution is scalable and concurrent users have access to the platform."
"I like the business logs. It's a very useful tool. Client-server communication is also very fast."
"It has a lot of community posts and support."
"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 a stable solution."
"Jenkins has built good plugins and has a good security platform."
 

Cons

"In terms of improvements, I think better logging for debugging purposes would be helpful, especially for complex workflows."
"Sometimes incremental steps should be taken during deployment instead of trying to execute all tasks simultaneously, particularly when dealing with AWS EKS clusters and Helm charts."
"The primary area for improvement I see is in artifact management, especially for saving screenshots or videos from failed tests or data-driven actions. Currently, the configuration for saving these artifacts is complex."
"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."
"We still use Jenkins for some tasks, which suggests there may be areas for improvement in GitHub Actions."
"The main improvement would be to add support for more programming languages and frameworks."
"There could be more integration options with different platforms."
"My company would want to see some AI features in the tool as it can add value to the product."
"The product should provide more visualization as to how many pipelines are performing and how many builds are happening. It should also integrate with Kubernetes and OpenShift."
"The scriptwriting process could be improved in this solution in the future."
"A more user-friendly UI for creating pipelines would be helpful."
"Logging could be improved to offer a clearer view."
"They need to improve their documentation."
"We would like to see the addition of mobile simulators support to this solution, as part of its open-source offering. We currently have to carry out manual testing for these platforms."
"This solution would be improved with the inclusion of an Artifactory (Universal artifact repository manager)."
"The learning curve is quite steep at the moment."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Regarding cost, as an enterprise, we negotiate our license and expenses, so I can't provide a specific rating for that."
"It is free and open platform, so I would rate it 1 out of 10."
"It's low-priced. Not high, but definitely low."
"For our basic usage, we didn't have to pay."
"The cost for GitHub Actions may be around $45 dollars per user."
"The product is slightly more expensive than some alternatives."
"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."
"The tool's price is okay and reasonable."
"We are using the free version of Jenkins. There are no costs or licensing."
"I used the free OSS version all the time. It was enough for all my needs."
"Jenkins is open-source, so it is free."
"​It is free.​"
"Jenkins is not expensive and reasonably priced."
"There is no cost. It is open source."
"We use the tool's open-source version which is free. There is an enterprise version which is expensive but comes with better support."
"Jenkins is a free open-source server."
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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
18%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
6%
 

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 pay approximately five dollars per developer per month. I created a GitHub organization for managing users.
What needs improvement with GitHub Actions?
GitHub Actions lacks a feature for automating the build process for mobile applications. I currently rely on GitHub Actions for web applications but have to use another tool for mobile apps.
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: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.