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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Continuous Integration
  4. Continuous Integration
  5. Buildkite vs Github Actions

Buildkite vs Github Actions

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Buildkite
Buildkite
Stacks210
Followers231
Votes115
GitHub Actions
GitHub Actions
Stacks48.2K
Followers3.1K
Votes27

Buildkite vs Github Actions: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Buildkite and Github Actions

1. Scalability and Integration flexibility: Buildkite offers more scalability and flexibility in integrating with various tools and services. It allows users to build custom pipelines and easily integrate with third-party services, making it suitable for complex and diverse workflows. On the other hand, Github Actions provides a more streamlined integration within the Github ecosystem, making it simpler for developers already using Github for their projects.

2. Pricing Structures: Buildkite and Github Actions have different pricing structures. Buildkite offers a transparent pricing model based on the number of concurrent builds, allowing users to pay only for what they need. In contrast, Github Actions provides a generous usage quota for free, but charges based on usage for higher resource needs, making it more cost-effective for smaller projects.

3. Visualization and Monitoring: Buildkite provides a robust dashboard and advanced visualization capabilities to give users a comprehensive overview of their pipelines. It offers real-time insights, detailed build logs, and extensive monitoring and reporting features. Github Actions also provides basic visualization and monitoring tools, but with more limited capabilities compared to Buildkite.

4. Customizability and Extensibility: Buildkite offers more flexibility in customizing and extending its features. It allows users to write custom scripts and execute commands tailored to their specific needs. Github Actions, on the other hand, has a more standardized and restricted workflow syntax, limiting the level of customization and extensibility options available to users.

5. Community Support and Ecosystem: Github Actions benefits from its large user base and vibrant community, making it easier to find community-developed actions and resources. It has a rich ecosystem of pre-built actions and templates that can be readily used in workflows. While Buildkite also has community support, it is relatively smaller compared to Github Actions.

6. Availability and Deployment: Buildkite is a cloud-hosted CI/CD solution that provides a fully managed service, ensuring high availability and easy setup. Github Actions, on the other hand, is tightly integrated within the Github platform and is deployed directly from Github repositories. This makes it more easily accessible and deployable for projects already hosted on Github.

In Summary, Buildkite offers more scalability, customizable pipelines, and advanced monitoring capabilities, while Github Actions provides simpler integration with Github, cost-effective pricing for smaller projects, and a vibrant community ecosystem. Users can choose according to their specific needs and preferences in terms of scalability, flexibility, and community support.

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Advice on Buildkite, GitHub Actions

Somnath
Somnath

Engineering Leader at Altimetrik Corp.

Jun 25, 2020

Needs adviceonCircleCICircleCIDrone.ioDrone.ioGitHub ActionsGitHub Actions

I am in the process of evaluating CircleCI, Drone.io, and GitHub Actions to cover my #CI/ #CD needs. I would appreciate your advice on comparative study w.r.t. attributes like language-Inclusive support, code-base integration, performance, cost, maintenance, support, ease of use, ability to deal with big projects, etc. based on actual industry experience.

Thanks in advance!

1.82M views1.82M
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Buildkite
Buildkite
GitHub Actions
GitHub Actions

CI and build automation tool that combines the power of your own build infrastructure with the convenience of a managed, centralized web UI. Used by Shopify, Basecamp, Digital Ocean, Venmo, Cochlear, Bugsnag and more.

It makes it easy to automate all your software workflows, now with world-class CI/CD. Build, test, and deploy your code right from GitHub. Make code reviews, branch management, and issue triaging work the way you want.

Fast and stable builds; Open source agent runs on almost any machine and architecture; Freedom to use your own internal or pre-release tools and services; Powerful distributed build tools; Key/value targeting of agents; Dynamic job allocation allows adding and removing build machines; Shared key/value and binary artifact stores for easily distributing build jobs regardless of machine or network; Integration with pull requests, deployments and releases; GitHub, Github Enterprise, Bitbucket, Gitlab or your own SCM; Slack, Hipchat, Webhooks, and LIFX notifications; Extensible per-project with agent hooks, webhooks and the rest API; GitHub Enterprise is supported standard; SSO
Multiple workflow files support; Free and open source; Workflow run interface; Search for actions in GitHub Marketplace; Integrated with Github's Checks API; Logs and artifacts downloading support
Statistics
Stacks
210
Stacks
48.2K
Followers
231
Followers
3.1K
Votes
115
Votes
27
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 18
    Great customer support
  • 17
    Github integration
  • 16
    Easy to use
  • 16
    Easy setup
  • 12
    Simplicity
Pros
  • 8
    Integration with GitHub
  • 5
    Free
  • 3
    Ready actions in Marketplace
  • 3
    Easy to duplicate a workflow
  • 2
    Read actions in Marketplace
Cons
  • 5
    Lacking [skip ci]
  • 4
    Lacking allow failure
  • 3
    Lacking job specific badges
  • 2
    No ssh login to servers
  • 1
    No manual launch
Integrations
Slack
Slack
GitHub
GitHub
Docker
Docker
GitLab
GitLab
Heroku
Heroku
HipChat
HipChat
Bitbucket
Bitbucket
Git
Git
GitHub Enterprise
GitHub Enterprise
TestFlight
TestFlight
GitHub
GitHub

What are some alternatives to Buildkite, GitHub Actions?

Jenkins

Jenkins

In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.

Travis CI

Travis CI

Free for open source projects, our CI environment provides multiple runtimes (e.g. Node.js or PHP versions), data stores and so on. Because of this, hosting your project on travis-ci.com means you can effortlessly test your library or applications against multiple runtimes and data stores without even having all of them installed locally.

Codeship

Codeship

Codeship runs your automated tests and configured deployment when you push to your repository. It takes care of managing and scaling the infrastructure so that you are able to test and release more frequently and get faster feedback for building the product your users need.

CircleCI

CircleCI

Continuous integration and delivery platform helps software teams rapidly release code with confidence by automating the build, test, and deploy process. Offers a modern software development platform that lets teams ramp.

TeamCity

TeamCity

TeamCity is a user-friendly continuous integration (CI) server for professional developers, build engineers, and DevOps. It is trivial to setup and absolutely free for small teams and open source projects.

Drone.io

Drone.io

Drone is a hosted continuous integration service. It enables you to conveniently set up projects to automatically build, test, and deploy as you make changes to your code. Drone integrates seamlessly with Github, Bitbucket and Google Code as well as third party services such as Heroku, Dotcloud, Google AppEngine and more.

wercker

wercker

Wercker is a CI/CD developer automation platform designed for Microservices & Container Architecture.

GoCD

GoCD

GoCD is an open source continuous delivery server created by ThoughtWorks. GoCD offers business a first-class build and deployment engine for complete control and visibility.

Airflow

Airflow

Use Airflow to author workflows as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of tasks. The Airflow scheduler executes your tasks on an array of workers while following the specified dependencies. Rich command lines utilities makes performing complex surgeries on DAGs a snap. The rich user interface makes it easy to visualize pipelines running in production, monitor progress and troubleshoot issues when needed.

Shippable

Shippable

Shippable is a SaaS platform that lets you easily add Continuous Integration/Deployment to your Github and BitBucket repositories. It is lightweight, super simple to setup, and runs your builds and tests faster than any other service.

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