IBM Rational Build Forge vs Jenkins comparison

IBM and Jenkins are both solutions in the Build Automation category. IBM is ranked #23, while Jenkins is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.1. IBM holds a 1.6% mindshare in BA, compared to Jenkins’s 7.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 88% of Jenkins users who would recommend it.

IBM Rational Build Forge

Read 2 IBM Rational Build Forge reviews

470 Views
465 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Jenkins

Read 92 Jenkins reviews

3,005 Views
2,945 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

IBM Rational Build Forge

Jenkins

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

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: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Rational Build Forge vs. Jenkins

December 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 881,082 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

4th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of IBM Rational Build Forge is 1.6%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jenkins is 7.5%, down from 11.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Jenkins	7.5%
IBM Rational Build Forge	1.6%
Other	90.9%

Build Automation

Featured Reviews

it_user1330545

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.

Read full review

Jamshaid I

Principal Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Efficient resource allocation and robust workflow with autoscaling capabilities

In Kubernetes, we use node-based architecture with nodes and pods and follow practices like RBAC and rollback. Multiple pods can run concurrently. 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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."

"Very good reporting features."

"Jenkins is very easy to use."

"The most valuable features of Jenkins are the integration with GitHub, and the automation for deployment."

"It's very useful when you want to automate different processes from beginning to end."

"Has enabled full automation of the company."

"We are using the open-source version and there is a lot of plugins and features that are available and it works on agents for free. In other solutions, it will cost extra to use them with the agent."

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

"Jenkins is very stable."

"We used it for all continuous integration parts, like automation testing, deployment, etc."

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."

"Jenkins can be improved, but it's difficult for me to explain. The initial setup could be more straightforward. If you connect Jenkins with bookings and lockouts, it can be challenging."

"Improvement-wise, I would want the solution's user interface to be changed for the better. In short, the solution can be made more user-friendly."

"Centralized user management would be helpful."

"Jenkins could improve in areas related to Kubernetes and Docker container integration, like machine allocation of nodes and Marshaling integration improvements."

"Adding support for OIDC and internal user databases simultaneously would improve Jenkins."

"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."

"Jenkins can sometimes run slow, especially when restarting after a plugin installation or when returning from a pipeline view to the dashboard."

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

More Jenkins cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"The pricing for Jenkins is free."

"There is no cost. It is open source."

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

"The solution is open source."

"It could be cheaper because there are many solutions available in the market. We are paying yearly."

"Jenkins is not expensive and reasonably priced."

"It is a free product."

"Jenkins is a free open-source server."

More Jenkins pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Build Automation solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.

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…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Financial Services Firm

20%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	28
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	56

Questions from the Community

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Jenkins?

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

See all answers

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.

See all answers

Comparisons

Digital.ai Release vs IBM Rational Build Forge

Compared 17% of the time

JFrog Pipeline vs IBM Rational Build Forge

Compared 14% of the time

AWS CodeBuild vs IBM Rational Build Forge

Compared 12% of the time

Harness vs IBM Rational Build Forge

Compared 11% of the time

Bamboo vs IBM Rational Build Forge

Compared 10% of the time

More IBM Rational Build Forge Competitors

GitLab vs Jenkins

Compared 12% of the time

Harness vs Jenkins

Compared 8% of the time

TeamCity vs Jenkins

Compared 7% of the time

Tekton vs Jenkins

Compared 7% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Jenkins

Compared 3% of the time

More Jenkins Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Build Automation

January 2026

Download IBM Rational Build Forge product report

Buyer's Guide

Jenkins

January 2026

Download Jenkins product report

Also Known As

Rational Build Forge

No data available

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.

Jenkins

Sample Customers

Cars.com

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

Buyer's Guide

IBM Rational Build Forge vs. Jenkins

December 2025

Free Report: IBM Rational Build Forge vs. Jenkins

Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Rational Build Forge vs. Jenkins and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our IBM Rational Build Forge vs. Jenkins report.

See our list of best Build Automation vendors.

We monitor all Build Automation reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.