IBM Rational Build Forge vs Jenkins comparison

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IBM Rational Build Forge

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

IBM Rational Build Forge and Jenkins compete in automation and build management. Jenkins is favored for its flexibility, open-source nature, and strong community support. IBM Rational Build Forge gains traction with robust enterprise support and integration, appealing to those with IBM ecosystems.

Features: IBM Rational Build Forge integrates with IBM software, offers advanced scheduling, and automation for large enterprises. Jenkins provides a vast array of plugins for customization and extensibility, alongside a strong open-source community that drives improvements and updates. The key distinction is IBM's enterprise-focused features compared to Jenkins's extensive plugin ecosystem and flexibility.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Rational Build Forge offers comprehensive support and structured deployment for enterprises, providing tailored assistance. Jenkins, being open-source, relies on community support, offering varied experiences. IBM's deployment model suits enterprise environments, while Jenkins's approach provides flexibility and adaptability.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Rational Build Forge involves higher setup costs due to its enterprise-level offerings and support services, promising substantial ROI for IBM tool suite users. Jenkins benefits from being open-source, reducing initial costs, leading to quicker ROI through flexibility and community enhancements. Jenkins is cost-effective for smaller to medium-sized enterprises seeking scalable solutions.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Rational Build Forge vs. Jenkins Report (Updated: March 2025).

IBM Rational Build Forge vs. Jenkins

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Helped 845,040 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

IBM Rational Build Forge

Ranking in Build Automation

23rd

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

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 April 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of IBM Rational Build Forge is 0.8%, down from 1.4% 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

Amy DeLorge

CRM Program Release Manager at Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center

Great reporting features and very functional

The solution could be more user friendly. Trying to train somebody on it can be difficult. If you're in this field, you kind of learn the tools, but trying to show a PM how to find report sheets to pull data was difficult. I had to show them how to write the queries and pull the data that they needed. It's not a layman's solution. If you're working with a programmer or with an architect, you won't have issues trying to relay how to utilize the tool. It was for those who cut the checks where there were problems enabling them to pull the data they required. I guess the answer is DevOps, but it depends on your environment. Just being able to sign into dashboards and get accurate results was my biggest thing with my PMs on my projects. They like charts and pie graphs, the ability to see things at a glance data where they could make decisions on the fly.

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Dinesh-Patil

Consultant at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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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

"Very good reporting features."

"All features are useful. Our customer doesn't have any complaints about the tool. It works pretty well for what they want and what they need to do."

"The solution is scalable and has a large number of plugins that can help you scale it to your needs."

"The initial setup is simple."

"The most valuable features of Jenkins are creating builds, and connecting them with Sonar for Sonar analysis. Additionally, we connect it with other vulnerability tools, such as WhiteSource which is useful."

"Also, the ability to customize these plugins is valuable. Its user-friendliness stands out, especially in its user interface which allows easy installation and configuration."

"We really appreciate that this solution is plug and play. When coding in the version control system, this product completes the build process automatically."

"The most valuable aspect of this solution is that there are multiple features. We can abstract certain variables and then build our deployment routine while being able to do some abstraction onto the SSH connections."

"I am not aware of the available options in the market right now compared to Jenkins, but I am pretty much happy with the service that Jenkins is providing our company."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is its integration between different tools."

More Jenkins pros

Cons

"Its logging can be improved. When something goes wrong, it is not always very easy to find the problem. It is hard to identify whether the problem is because of low memory in the server or some configuration in Rational Build Forge. The error logs are not very detailed, and they should provide more information. It should also have more integration with third-party tools. It would be great to have more integration with third-party tools."

"Not user friendly for the layman."

"The documentation on plugin development could be better: more examples. "

"The scriptwriting process could be improved in this solution in the future."

"There are some difficulties when we need to execute the DB script."

"I would like to have an integrated dashboard on top of it and a better UX to look at. The dashboard could be better in terms of integration with other tools. We should be able to have a single pane of glass across all the tools that we use where Jenkins is the pipeline. This can be a very good upgrade to it."

"Jenkins could improve by adding the ability to edit test automation and make time planning better because it is difficult. It should be easier to do."

"The bug fix speed is very slow."

"I do not have any notes for improvement."

"Sometimes, random errors of metadata are not there, which causes delays. These are essentially gaps in the information being passed to the job."

More Jenkins cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"It is a cheap solution."

"We are using the free version of Jenkins. There is not a license required to use the solution because it is open-source."

"I used the free OSS version all the time. It was enough for all my needs."

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

"The solution is open source."

"We are using the free version of Jenkins. There are no costs or licensing."

"Jenkins is open source."

"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."

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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

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

18%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Educational Organization

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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What do you like most about Jenkins?

Jenkins has been instrumental in automating our build and deployment processes.

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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.

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Product Reports

Build Automation

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Also Known As

Rational Build Forge

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Overview

IBM Rational Build Forge is an adaptive execution framework that helps automate and standardize the software assembly process. Rational Build Forge helps teams standardize repetitive tasks, improve software quality and manage compliance mandates. This software scales to 25 seats. Rational Build Forge delivers:
Flexibility - gives developers self-service access to preconfigured build processes from within their integrated development environment (IDE). You can add IBM Rational software products to further enhance automation, reporting and integration.
Productivity - accelerates build and release cycles through iterative development, parallel processes and efficient use of hardware.
Compliance - simplifies compliance management with self-documenting audit trails and role-based security.
Compatibility - increases team efficiency with centralized build and release management using the tools you have today.

IBM

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

Cars.com

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

IBM Rational Build Forge vs. Jenkins