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GoCD 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

GoCD
Ranking in Build Automation
15th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (15th), Release Automation (8th)
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 GoCD is 1.5%, down from 1.8% 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

RajeshReddy - PeerSpot reviewer
The UI is colorful, but the user experience must be improved
We can see all the pipelines with a simple search. The UI is colorful. The user experience is very rich. The product is very easy to learn if we know a bit of the basics. If we have someone to show us how to use it, it is very easy.
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

"Permission separations mean that we can grant limited permissions for each team or team member."
"The most notable aspect is its user interface, which we find to be user-friendly and straightforward for deploying and comprehending pipelines. We have the ability to create multiple pipelines, and in addition to that, the resource consumption is impressive."
"The UI is colorful."
"GoCD's open-source nature is valuable."
"For business needs, Jenkins is the most relevant choice because it can be self-hosted, the price is good, it’s robust, and requires almost no effort for maintenance."
"Jenkins allows us to automate deployment, so I no longer have to do it manually. That's the primary use case. The other advantage of Jenkins is that it's open source. It was free for me to download and install. It's a product that's been in use for many years, so I can find a lot of support online for any issues that I may encounter while configuring anything for a given use case."
"The most valuable features of Jenkins are the integration of automatic scripts for testing and the user's ability to use any script."
"There are a large number of plugins available for integration with third party systems."
"It is open source, flexible, scalable, and easy to use. It is easy to maintain for the administrator. It is a continuous integration tool, and its enterprise version is quite mature. It has good integrations and plug-ins. Azure DevOps can also be integrated with Jenkins."
"Configuration management: It is so easy to configure a Jenkins instance. Migrate configuration to a new environment just by copying XML files and setting up new nodes."
"Automation of chores like deployment, frequent manual tasks (like running scripts on test and production systems) reduced the time used and the number of errors made by engineers, freeing them to do meaningful work instead."
"It is a stable solution."
 

Cons

"The aspect that requires attention is the user management component. When integrating with BitLabs and authenticating through GitLab, there are specific features we desire. One important feature is the ability to import users directly from GitLab, along with their respective designations, and assign appropriate privileges based on that information. Allocating different privileges to users is a time-consuming process for us."
"It is difficult to assign different access levels because it relies on separate keys for developer and admin access, which could be simplified."
"The documentation really should be improved by including real examples and more setup cases."
"The tool must be more user-friendly."
"I would like them to provide space for people to have a central node that stores all the logs of workspace information in a distributed fashion to facilitate backup and restoration. Currently, everything is stored on one node, so you need to set up distributed storage or an endpoint that you can use for backing up your information."
"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."
"The onboarding of Jenkins should be smoother, and it should have more pipelines available as it's deployed on many different servers."
"I sometimes face a bottleneck when installing the plugins on an offline machine. Mapping the dependencies and then installing the correct sequence of dependencies is a nightmare, and it took me two days to do it."
"Jenkins could improve in areas related to Kubernetes and Docker container integration, like machine allocation of nodes and Marshaling integration improvements."
"Jenkins should adopt the Pipeline as Code approach by building a deployment pipeline using the Jenkins file."
"Adding support for OIDC and internal user databases simultaneously would improve Jenkins."
"We sometimes face challenges during version upgrades, such as failures when migrating Kubernetes versions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's an open-source and free tool."
"This is an open-source solution and it is inexpensive."
"The open-source version is free, but small companies would not be able to afford the cloud-based version."
"Jenkins is not expensive and reasonably priced."
"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 an open-source platform."
"This is an open-source solution for the basic features. However, if an organization wishes to include specific functionality, outside of the basic package, there are extra costs involved."
"​It is free.​"
"In our company, we do pay for the licensing of the solution."
"I used the free OSS version all the time. It was enough for all my needs."
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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
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Retailer
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
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 needs improvement with GoCD?
One area of product improvement is the access control system. It is difficult to assign different access levels because it relies on separate keys for developer and admin access, which could be sim...
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

 

Also Known As

Adaptive ALM, Thoughtworks Go
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Ancestry.com, Barclay Card, AutoTrader, BT Financial Group, Gamesys, Nike, Vodafone, Haufe Lexware, Medidata, Hoovers
Airial, Clarus Financial Technology, cubetutor, Metawidget, mysocio, namma, silverpeas, Sokkva, So Rave, tagzbox
Find out what your peers are saying about GoCD vs. Jenkins and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.