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Buildkite VS Jenkins

Compare Buildkite VS Jenkins and see what are their differences

Buildkite logo Buildkite

Buildkite is a platform for running fast, secure, and scalable continuous integration pipelines on your own infrastructure.

Jenkins logo Jenkins

Jenkins is an open-source continuous integration server with 300+ plugins to support all kinds of software development
  • Buildkite Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-24

Buildkite is a CI/CD platform that helps you deliver software at scale. Join teams like Shopify, PagerDuty and Wayfair to discover how to easily autoscale and manage the build agents inside your own infrastructure, while leaning on the fully supported and managed central web interface and APIs. You can also measure and monitor your developer SLOs, and get deep metrics and observability into your CI and CD reliability and performance.

  • Jenkins Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-15

Buildkite

$ Details
Release Date
2013 January
Startup details
Country
Australia
State
Victoria
City
Fitzroy
Founder(s)
Keith Pitt
Employees
10 - 19

Buildkite features and specs

  • Scalability
    Buildkite allows users to scale their infrastructure seamlessly by utilizing their own servers or cloud infrastructure, ensuring high performance and reliability.
  • Flexibility
    Supports pipelines as code, enabling users to define their CI/CD workflows in a way that is easy to version and maintain.
  • Security
    Jobs run on your own infrastructure, so your source code and secrets never leave your network, enhancing security.
  • Extensive Integrations
    Supports a wide range of plugins and integrations, facilitating seamless integration with other tools and services.
  • Health Monitoring
    Provides real-time health monitoring and analytics, which help in diagnosing issues quickly.
  • Customization
    Highly customizable, allowing teams to tailor the platform to fit their unique workflows and requirements.

Possible disadvantages of Buildkite

  • Setup Complexity
    Requires significant initial setup and configuration, which could be complex for users unfamiliar with CI/CD pipelines.
  • Self-hosted Agents
    Needs self-hosted agents, which means users need to manage their own infrastructure and related costs.
  • Cost
    Can become expensive, especially for larger teams or those requiring extensive build resources and integrations.
  • Learning Curve
    Steeper learning curve for new users compared to some other CI/CD tools, owing to its advanced features and customization options.
  • Resource Management
    Managing and updating build agents can be resource-intensive and requires ongoing maintenance.

Jenkins features and specs

  • Open Source
    Jenkins is an open-source tool, which means users can modify, share, and use it without licensing fees.
  • Large Plugin Ecosystem
    Jenkins has a robust plugin ecosystem with over 1,500 plugins, allowing extensive customization and functionality to fit various DevOps needs.
  • Active Community
    The active and large community of Jenkins users and developers provides extensive support, documentation, and shared solutions.
  • Platform Independent
    Jenkins can run on various platforms including Windows, macOS, and various Unix-like systems, providing flexibility in deployment.
  • CI/CD Capabilities
    Jenkins is well-suited for implementing Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, facilitating automated build, test, and deployment processes.
  • Scalability
    It supports distributed builds using Master-Slave architecture, enabling you to scale your build and deployment processes across multiple machines.
  • Extensible
    Thanks to its plugin architecture, Jenkins can be extended to integrate with a variety of tools and services, making it highly adaptable.

Possible disadvantages of Jenkins

  • Complex Setup
    Initial setup and configuration of Jenkins can be complicated, especially for new users or large-scale environments.
  • Resource Intensive
    Jenkins can be resource-intensive, requiring significant memory and CPU, particularly for large projects or high-frequency builds.
  • Maintenance Overhead
    Due to its extensive plugin usage, keeping Jenkins and its plugins updated can be time-consuming and sometimes problematic.
  • Steep Learning Curve
    Learning to use Jenkins effectively can have a steep learning curve, particularly due to the need to understand its various plugins and configuration options.
  • User Interface
    The user interface of Jenkins is sometimes considered outdated and not as intuitive or user-friendly as some of its modern counterparts.
  • Security Vulnerabilities
    As with many open-source tools, Jenkins can have security vulnerabilities that need to be regularly addressed to ensure a secure environment.
  • Poor Plugin Compatibility
    Not all plugins are maintained equally, leading to potential compatibility issues or bugs when using multiple plugins together.

Analysis of Buildkite

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Buildkite is considered a strong choice for teams seeking a robust and flexible CI/CD solution that provides control over their build infrastructure.

Why this product is good

  • Buildkite is a highly regarded CI/CD platform known for its reliability, scalability, and flexibility. It allows developers to run builds on their own infrastructure while offering a cloud-based management interface. This hybrid approach provides the best of both worlds: control over hardware and the benefits of a managed service. Buildkite supports a wide range of languages and platforms, integrates with popular tools, and is praised for its fast build times, security features, and excellent customer support.

Recommended for

  • Teams that need to maintain control over their build infrastructure while benefiting from a managed interface.
  • Organizations that require scalable and fast continuous integration and deployment pipelines.
  • Developers looking for a CI/CD tool that integrates well with their existing workflows and tools.

Buildkite videos

FastMail Customer Stories - Buildkite

Jenkins videos

Mick Jenkins - The Circus Album Review | DEHH

More videos:

  • Review - Mick Jenkins - The Water[s] ALBUM REVIEW
  • Review - Mick Jenkins - THE WATERS First REACTION/REVIEW

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Buildkite and Jenkins)
Continuous Integration
12 12%
88% 88
DevOps Tools
10 10%
90% 90
Continuous Deployment
12 12%
88% 88
Online Services
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Buildkite and Jenkins

Buildkite Reviews

The Best Alternatives to Jenkins for Developers
Buildkite is a CI/CD tool that can scale and adjust according to your needs. It has an interesting method for managing build agents. Rather than using a central build server, Buildkite lets you create agents whenever required; this means it is easy to expand or shrink the number of available agents dynamically. This strategy makes Buildkite highly scalable and appropriate...
Source: morninglif.com
The Best Alternatives to Jenkins for Developers
Buildkite enables you to run continuous integration pipelines on your infrastructure. It provides fast and secure integration. It allows you to run multiple builds with maximum control. It has an interface that provides visibility of your pipelines, which you can monitor.

Jenkins Reviews

The Best Alternatives to Jenkins for Developers
Jenkins X, a new kind of Jenkins made for cloud environments and modern development practices, tries to make setting up and handling CI/CD pipelines easier. It uses Kubernetes along with GitOps ideas in order to offer teams working on cloud-native apps an automated way that is less complex when it comes to managing their project’s lifecycle.
Source: morninglif.com
Top 5 Jenkins Alternatives in 2024: Automation of IT Infrastructure Written by Uzair Ghalib on the 02nd Jan 2024
If you have searched about Jenkins alternatives and you are reading this article, then there must be one of the three reasons you are here. You are already using Jenkins and are fed up with facing different issues and looking for a change. Or maybe you haven’t faced any issues yet but have heard the stories about Jenkins issues and looking to avoid them by choosing an...
Source: attuneops.io
What Are The Best Alternatives To Ansible? | Attune, Jenkins &, etc.
Jenkin is a popular tool for performing continuous integration of software projects in the market. Plus, it continues the delivery of projects regardless of the platform you’re working on. And it is also responsible for handling any build or continuous integration with various testing and development technologies. As a product, Jenkins is more developer-centric and...
Best 8 Ansible Alternatives & equivalent in 2022
Jenkins is an open-source continuous integration tool. It is written using the Java programming language. It facilitates real-time testing and reporting on isolated changes in a larger code base. This software similar to Ansible helps developers to quickly find and solve defects in their code base & automate testing of their builds.
Source: www.guru99.com
Top 10 Most Popular Jenkins Alternatives for DevOps in 2024
Jenkins may be a de-facto tool for CI/CD, but it’s no longer a shiny newcomer borne directly out of modern DevOps best practices. Although Jenkins is still relevant, newer tools can offer improved ergonomics and expanded functionality. These can be better suited to contemporary software delivery methods.
Source: spacelift.io

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Buildkite should be more popular than Jenkins. It has been mentiond 11 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Buildkite mentions (11)

  • A list of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings that have free tiers of interest to devops and infradev
    Buildkite Pipelines: Free developer tier includes unlimited concurrency, up to 3 users, 5k job minutes/month, and 30-day build retention, with more free inclusions for open source projects Test Analytics — Get more out of your test suites, works with any CI platform. The free developer tier includes 100k test executions/month, with more free inclusions for open-source projects. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Continuos Integration and C++
    Buildkite.com you can run agents where ever you want. Source: about 2 years ago
  • What I learned at Gitlab that I don't want to forget
    Give https://buildkite.com/ for CI/CD a try, you'll love it! - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • CircleCI Layoffs
    Even that niche has better competitors, I think. I haven't used on-prem CCI, but I used hosted CCI for several years and when my team switched to https://buildkite.com/ it was a huge breath of fresh air. I think BuildKite is the only CI system I've used I thought was actually worth paying for, and I bet it works out cheaper than self-hosted CCI in most cases as well. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • Back with a few more jobs!
    Buildkite: a startup that offers a CI/CD platform that combines the power of your own build infrastructure with the convenience of a managed, centralized web UI. Source: over 2 years ago
View more

Jenkins mentions (7)

  • CircleCI vs. Jenkins
    Jenkins is an open-source automation server used for software continuous integration and delivery. It automates various tasks, such as building, testing, and deploying applications.  It is easily extendable due to its vast ecosystem of plugins, making it easy to integrate into version control systems like Git, build tools like Maven/Gradle, and deployment platforms like AWS and Docker. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Automated delivery React / Vue app for each Pull Request.
    It will give you a possibility to find and solve problems faster, release more stable and higher quality products. Here we will use CircleCI, but you can use whatever you need (Jenkins, Travis CI, GitLab CI). - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Is Jenkins dead? v2
    CloudBees Jenkins Platform is a commercial offering from CloudBees, it is not the Jenkins project itself (which is open source). Jenkins is alive and well. See https://jenkins.io. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • ELI5 what is Jenkins?
    Ok. I'm talking about this: https://jenkins.io/. Source: over 2 years ago
  • I wanted a self hosted alternative to Atlassian status page so I build my own application !
    Currently supported : Datadog, Jenkins, DNS, HTTP. Source: over 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Buildkite and Jenkins, you can also consider the following products

Bitrise - Tens of thousands of agencies, startups and enterprise companies with mobile apps - including Runkeeper, Grindr, Duolingo and more - use Bitrise to automate their way to increased productivity & speed

CircleCI - CircleCI gives web developers powerful Continuous Integration and Deployment with easy setup and maintenance.

Codeship - Codeship is a fast and secure hosted Continuous Delivery platform that scales with your needs.

Travis CI - Simple, flexible, trustworthy CI/CD tools. Join hundreds of thousands who define tests and deployments in minutes, then scale up simply with parallel or multi-environment builds using Travis CI’s precision syntax—all with the developer in mind.

Bamboo - Bamboo is a continuous integration and deployment tool that ties automated builds, tests and releases together in a single workflow.

Semaphore - Semaphore is a fully managed, high performance testing and deployment solution for your company. A Continuous Integration tool.