GitHub Actions vs Jenkins comparison

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GitHub Actions

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

Jenkins and GitHub Actions compete in the continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) space. GitHub Actions appears to have the upper hand in terms of integration and ease of use, while Jenkins shines with its extensive plugin support and customization capabilities.

Features: Jenkins is renowned for its open-source community, extensive plugin ecosystem, and high flexibility as an automation platform. It offers configurable pipelines and integration capabilities with third-party systems, supporting CI/CD processes effectively. In contrast, GitHub Actions is praised for its seamless integration within GitHub, simplifying CI/CD pipelines while facilitating automation without manual intervention. It offers built-in scalability and a user-friendly interface, making it versatile for various deployment needs.

Room for Improvement: Jenkins could refine its user interface, enhance plugin stability, and streamline cloud integration processes, particularly with AWS and Azure. GitHub Actions could expand its programming language support, simplify debugging processes, and improve dashboard and pipeline management. Both platforms could enhance specific integrations to boost user experience further.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Jenkins is prevalently used in on-premises and hybrid environments, heavily supported by its open-source community via extensive documentation and forums. GitHub Actions is often deployed in public cloud settings, appreciated for its streamlined cloud integration and comprehensive community support that includes detailed documentation and forums for user assistance.

Pricing and ROI: Jenkins is an open-source, cost-effective solution with no licensing fees but some addon costs. It offers significant ROI through operational savings. GitHub Actions provides a mostly free service with additional costs for enterprise features beyond certain usage limits. Advanced features and enterprise plans carry pricing, though users find them generally affordable. Both solutions deliver notable ROI through automation efficiencies.

To learn more, read our detailed GitHub Actions vs. Jenkins Report (Updated: June 2025).

GitHub Actions vs. Jenkins

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Helped 860,592 peers since 2012

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

4th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

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

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of GitHub Actions is 11.5%, up from 6.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jenkins is 10.5%, down from 12.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation

Featured Reviews

MohamedMostafa1

Chief Software Engineer at Valeo

Handles scalability well, automatically managing execution infrastructure without requiring additional configurationsThe automation feature of GitHub Actions is

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.

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Mahdi Mallaki

Senior Devops Engineer at Rakuten

Has a community of plugin providers but needs improvement in Kubernetes integration

Integrating Jenkins with other tools or solutions has presented some challenges. For instance, when attempting to integrate Jenkins with Kubernetes, I encountered numerous errors, which took several days to resolve. In Jenkins, adding a feature typically involves incorporating the repository feature separately. Jenkins lacks built-in Git repository functionality, necessitating an external Git repository to store Jenkins manifests. In contrast, GitLab offers an integrated Git repository and pipeline runner, streamlining the process. One improvement for Jenkins could be integrating a Git server, simplifying the management of CI/CD pipelines. Currently, with Jenkins, modifying pipeline manifests requires navigating to a separate Git repository. In GitLab, however, manifest changes can be made directly within the repository.

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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

"It offers numerous built-in features for pipeline management, release management, and even work item tracking on boards, which makes it a versatile tool that seamlessly integrates with hardware and facilitates optimization."

"GitHub Actions is valuable for its ease of use and integration."

"The product's most beneficial feature is the ability to create workflows within the solution."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is a good product that offers stability and performance."

"GitHub Actions is a beautiful tool that integrates smoothly with all major tools, reducing CI/CD work by 30% to 40%."

"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."

"GitHub Actions can be easily configured, especially for environment variables and secrets. The UI is understandable and user-friendly for setting up CI/CD pipelines. I prefer tools like GitLab, where the pipeline starts quickly and is accessible near the commits for easy access. However, many CI/CD tools are interchangeable due to similar features of GitHub Actions and other similar tools."

"It is a very stable solution as we have not faced any issues."

More GitHub Actions pros

"I love Jenkins. I like that you work on anything, and you make anything. Jenkins is very important for my team. I am satisfied with the product."

"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."

"It is very useful for us to be able to collect and manage automatic processing pipelines."

"Jenkins is free and open source."

"Jenkins's open-based framework is very valuable."

"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 automated elements are easy to use and you can put them into your server."

More Jenkins pros

Cons

"Improvements could be made in terms of time-saving capabilities and resolving potential complexities in centralized workflows."

"GitHub Actions lacks a feature for automating the build process for mobile applications."

"In our company, procedures or rules need to be completed, which is not a problem with GitHub Actions but with our process."

"There could be more integration options with different platforms."

"The main improvement would be to add support for more programming languages and frameworks."

"The reporting capabilities are somewhat limited."

"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."

"Sometimes it is quite complex to commit code from our local system to the GitHub repository; creating a folder in GitHub can be tedious."

More GitHub Actions cons

"The onboarding of Jenkins should be smoother, and it should have more pipelines available as it's deployed on many different servers."

"For this solution to be a 10, it has to be a lot more stable. Maybe the public version of Jenkins is stable, but in our case it's not stable."

"It does not have a very user-friendly interface."

"The documentation is not helpful, as it is not user-friendly."

"The UI of Jenkins could improve."

"Jenkins relies on the old version of interface for configuration management. This needs improvement."

"The user interface could be updated a little."

"It would be better if there were an option to remove its Java dependency. This would make it more compatible with other software, and it could be much better. At present, we have to depend on Java whenever we want to deploy agents."

More Jenkins cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost for GitHub Actions may be around $45 dollars per user."

"Regarding cost, as an enterprise, we negotiate our license and expenses, so I can't provide a specific rating for that."

"For our basic usage, we didn't have to pay."

"The tool's price is okay and reasonable."

"It's low-priced. Not high, but definitely low."

"It is free and open platform, so I would rate it 1 out of 10."

"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 product is slightly more expensive than some alternatives."

"Jenkins is open source and free."

"In our company, we do pay for the licensing of the solution."

"The tool is open-source."

"Jenkins is a free solution, it is open source."

"It is a cheap solution."

"The solution is one of the lowest costs compared to competitors."

"Jenkins is open source."

"The open-source version is free, but small companies would not be able to afford the cloud-based version."

More Jenkins pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user184734

Systems Administrator at Facebook

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…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Government

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?

I would need to check with my team about specific shortcomings. We still use Jenkins ( /products/jenkins-reviews ) for some tasks, which suggests there may be areas for improvement in GitHub Actions.

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.

Harness vs GitHub Actions

Comparisons

Tekton vs GitHub Actions

Compared 34% of the time

Compared 15% of the time

Bamboo vs GitHub Actions

Compared 14% of the time

TeamCity vs GitHub Actions

Compared 9% of the time

AWS CodeStar vs GitHub Actions

Compared 1% of the time

More GitHub Actions Competitors

Harness vs Jenkins

Compared 17% of the time

GitLab vs Jenkins

Compared 14% of the time

Bazel vs Jenkins

Compared 9% of the time

Tekton vs Jenkins

Compared 8% of the time

Bamboo vs Jenkins

Compared 7% of the time

More Jenkins Competitors

Product Reports

GitHub Actions

Download GitHub Actions product report

Download Jenkins product report

Overview

GitHub Actions streamlines CI/CD processes with an intuitive YAML workflow and robust automation, enhancing efficiency and integration with third-party tools and cloud providers.

GitHub Actions automates development pipelines, supports scalable public and private runners, and manages secure secrets. This tool integrates seamlessly with platforms like AWS, Kubernetes, Google Cloud, and Databricks. It enhances DevOps workflows with reliable task automation. Users note areas for UI and deployment tool improvements, artifact management simplification, and additional programming language support. Debugging complexity and hosting agent transitions pose challenges, along with integration enhancements for tools like OneDrive.

What are GitHub Actions' key features?

YAML Workflow Creation: Simplifies configuration with intuitive YAML.
CI/CD Integration: Provides seamless integration within DevOps pipelines.
Automation Capabilities: Automates tasks with minimal manual intervention.
Third-Party Tool Compatibility: Works well with diverse tools and platforms.
Secure Secrets Management: Protects sensitive information effectively.

What benefits do users find in GitHub Actions?

Enhanced Performance: Boosts task execution speed and reliability.
Scalability: Supports growth with flexible runner options.
Improved Release Cycles: Ensures consistent updates and deployments.
Workflow Efficiency: Reduces manual tasks, increasing operational efficiency.

Companies in tech and software development frequently utilize GitHub Actions for integrating, deploying, and versioning projects. It is often employed for deploying applications to cloud environments like AWS and Kubernetes, managing extensive CI/CD workflows, and automating test and security operations, thereby streamlining production cycles across industries.

GitHub

Jenkins is an award-winning application that monitors executions of repeated jobs, such as building a software project or jobs run by cron.

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Airial, Clarus Financial Technology, cubetutor, Metawidget, mysocio, namma, silverpeas, Sokkva, So Rave, tagzbox

GitHub Actions vs. Jenkins