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

Buildkite vs Jenkins

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Buildkite
Buildkite
Stacks210
Followers231
Votes115
Jenkins
Jenkins
Stacks59.2K
Followers50.4K
Votes2.2K
GitHub Stars24.6K
Forks9.2K

Buildkite vs Jenkins: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Buildkite and Jenkins are both popular continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) tools used to automate software development and delivery processes. While they serve the same purpose, there are several key differences between the two.

  1. Ecosystem and Plugin Availability: Buildkite provides an extensive collection of first-party plugins that cover the majority of CI/CD use cases. However, Jenkins offers a much larger ecosystem of third-party plugins, giving users a wider range of options and flexibility in customizing their CI/CD pipelines.

  2. Ease of Use and Configuration: Buildkite focuses on simplicity and ease of use, providing a user-friendly interface and intuitive configuration process. On the other hand, Jenkins has a steeper learning curve and can be more complex to configure, requiring users to have a deeper understanding of its underlying architecture.

  3. Scalability and Performance: Buildkite is known for its scalability and ability to handle large-scale CI/CD pipelines. It allows users to easily distribute agents across multiple machines, optimizing resource utilization and improving overall performance. Jenkins, while scalable, may require additional configuration and setup to achieve similar levels of scalability.

  4. Hosted vs Self-Hosted: Buildkite primarily operates as a hosted service, providing a cloud-based solution that takes care of infrastructure management and maintenance. Jenkins, on the other hand, is typically self-hosted, allowing users to have full control over their CI/CD infrastructure but also requiring them to handle the setup, maintenance, and scaling of servers.

  5. Built-in Features: Buildkite offers a more streamlined and focused approach to CI/CD, providing essential features out of the box, such as parallelism, artifact management, and pipeline insights. Jenkins, being highly extensible, requires users to install and configure additional plugins to access similar functionalities.

  6. Community Support: Jenkins has a vast and active community of users and contributors, making it easier to find support, documentation, and resources. Buildkite, while growing in popularity, has a smaller community in comparison, which may result in limited community-driven support options.

In Summary, Buildkite and Jenkins differ in terms of plugin availability, ease of use, scalability, hosting options, built-in features, and community support.

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Advice on Buildkite, Jenkins

Balaramesh
Balaramesh

Apr 20, 2020

Needs adviceonAzure PipelinesAzure Pipelines.NET.NETJenkinsJenkins

We are currently using Azure Pipelines for continous integration. Our applications are developed witn .NET framework. But when we look at the online Jenkins is the most widely used tool for continous integration. Can you please give me the advice which one is best to use for my case Azure pipeline or jenkins.

663k views663k
Comments
Pedro Gil
Pedro Gil

Head of Engineering at lengoo GmbH

May 4, 2021

Decided

We replaced Jenkins with Github Actions for all our repositories hosted on Github. GA has two significant benefits for us compared to an external build tool: it's simpler, and it sits at eye level.

Its simplicity and smooth user experience makes it easier for all developers to adopt, giving them more autonomy.

Sitting at eye level means it's completely run and configured right alongside the code, so that it's easier to observe and adjust our builds as we go.

These two benefits have made "the build" less of a system engineer responsibility and more of a developer tool, giving developers more ownership from code to release.

77.7k views77.7k
Comments
StackShare
StackShare

Apr 17, 2019

Needs advice

From a StackShare Community member: "Currently we use Travis CI and have optimized it as much as we can so our builds are fairly quick. Our boss is all about redundancy so we are looking for another solution to fall back on in case Travis goes down and/or jacks prices way up (they were recently acquired). Could someone recommend which CI we should go with and if they have time, an explanation of how they're different?"

529k views529k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Buildkite
Buildkite
Jenkins
Jenkins

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.

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.

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
Easy installation;Easy configuration;Change set support;Permanent links;RSS/E-mail/IM Integration;After-the-fact tagging;JUnit/TestNG test reporting;Distributed builds;File fingerprinting;Plugin Support
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
24.6K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
9.2K
Stacks
210
Stacks
59.2K
Followers
231
Followers
50.4K
Votes
115
Votes
2.2K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 18
    Great customer support
  • 17
    Github integration
  • 16
    Easy to use
  • 16
    Easy setup
  • 12
    Simplicity
Pros
  • 523
    Hosted internally
  • 469
    Free open source
  • 318
    Great to build, deploy or launch anything async
  • 243
    Tons of integrations
  • 211
    Rich set of plugins with good documentation
Cons
  • 13
    Workarounds needed for basic requirements
  • 10
    Groovy with cumbersome syntax
  • 8
    Plugins compatibility issues
  • 7
    Lack of support
  • 7
    Limited abilities with declarative pipelines
Integrations
Slack
Slack
GitHub
GitHub
Docker
Docker
GitLab
GitLab
Heroku
Heroku
HipChat
HipChat
Bitbucket
Bitbucket
Git
Git
GitHub Enterprise
GitHub Enterprise
TestFlight
TestFlight
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Buildkite, Jenkins?

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.

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.

Snap CI

Snap CI

Snap CI is a cloud-based continuous integration & continuous deployment tool with powerful deployment pipelines. Integrates seamlessly with GitHub and provides fast feedback so you can deploy with ease.

Appveyor

Appveyor

AppVeyor aims to give powerful Continuous Integration and Deployment tools to every .NET developer without the hassle of setting up and maintaining their own build server.

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