Advantages of migrating from GitHub Actions

Scaling and limits

GitHub Actions imposes a 256-job matrix cap per workflow run and self-hosted runners require manual provisioning with slow startup times.

Buildkite Pipelines supports 100,000+ concurrent agents with no artificial limits. Agents are lightweight software requiring only an outbound HTTPS connection, and turnkey autoscaling is available through the Elastic CI Stack for AWS and Agent Stack for Kubernetes.

Dynamic pipelines and static workflows

GitHub Actions workflows are static once triggered. To add jobs based on what changed, you must dispatch new workflows or pre-declare everything up front, leading to wasted compute. Also, you can only nest workflow calls up to 10 levels of depth, and secret passing must be explicit instead of allowing each pipeline to define what it needs.

In Buildkite Pipelines, with the help of dynamic pipelines, you can generate or modify steps at runtime based on changed files, repository state, or any custom logic. This way, you can fan out tests only after builds succeed, skip unnecessary steps, or generate deployment steps based on what actually changed.

Better reliability

GitHub Actions experiences frequent reliability issues that can block entire organizations.

Buildkite Pipelines maintains strong uptime, and since builds run on your infrastructure, you're not affected by multi-tenant cloud environment problems or resource contention from other tenants.

High-performance hosted machines

Buildkite hosted agents offer the newest Apple silicon available for CI, so mobile teams can test on the same hardware their users run.

Persistent cache volumes on NVMe (Linux) and disk images (macOS) retain dependencies, Git mirrors, and Docker layers for up to 14 days. GitHub caches are limited to 7 days and 10 GB per repository, restored from object storage for each job.

Centralized visibility

GitHub Actions is distributed across repositories with no central view for governance, guardrails, or standardization at scale.

Buildkite Pipelines provides a unified dashboard to monitor build health across your entire organization.

Monorepo performance

GitHub has no native path-based filtering for dynamic step injection.

Buildkite handles large monorepos efficiently through dynamic pipelines that analyze dependencies and build only what changed, with the if_changed attribute for declarative path filtering.

Test optimization

GitHub has no native test intelligence—teams must rely on custom scripts or marketplace actions.

Buildkite Test Engine provides intelligent test splitting that balances suites dynamically using historical runtime data, automatic flaky test retries, flaky test quarantine, and rich analytics.

Predictable pricing

GitHub Actions uses per-minute billing that can lead to unexpected costs as teams grow.

In Buildkite Pipelines, pricing is based on agent concurrency using the 95th percentile, so short bursts don't inflate costs and you'll also be able to use your own compute including spot instances to educe costs further.

Job routing and priorities

Buildkite Pipelines provides sophisticated job routing with queues, priorities, and concurrency controls. Urgent hotfixes can move ahead of long test suites, and risky deploys don't collide. GitHub Actions lacks this level of control.

Security and compliance

With Buildkite Pipelines, your code and secrets never leave your environment. The least-privilege GitHub App integration means Buildkite never sees your source code. You maintain full control over your build infrastructure and security posture, which is critical for organizations with strict compliance requirements. GitHub's hosted runners require code and secrets to pass through their infrastructure.

Developer experience

Buildkite provides rich logging with colors, links, and emojis that make build output easier to parse. The JUnit Annotate plugin surfaces failed tests inline for faster triage. Cross-repository triggers enable automatic build choreography across multiple repositories.

Migration path

You can try out the Buildkite pipeline converter to see how your existing GitHub Actions pipelines might look converted to Buildkite Pipelines.

To start converting your GitHub Actions pipelines to Buildkite Pipelines, follow the instructions in Migrate from GitHub Actions, then migrate pipeline by pipeline. The key changes you'll need to be mindful of:

• jobs become steps with key attributes
• needs becomes depends_on
• runs-on maps to agents queues
• actions/checkout is removed since Buildkite Pipelines checks out code automatically.

If you would like to receive assistance in migrating from GitHub Actions to Buildkite Pipelines, please reach out to the Buildkite Support Team at support@buildkite.com.