When you're building a CI/CD pipeline, the platform you choose can have a huge impact on your team's ability to ship software effectively. It's a critical decision that often comes down to a choice between established tools like Jenkins and newer ones like GitHub Actions — two tools that represent fundamentally different approaches to the challenges of software delivery today.
The landscape is shifting dramatically as well. According to recent surveys, GitHub Actions has surpassed Jenkins in developer adoption, despite that Jenkins still holds over 40% of the CI/CD market overall. This evolution reflects changing priorities in how engineering teams approach automation and deployment.
In this post, we'll explore both Jenkins and GitHub Actions from a practical perspective to help you make an informed choice that best suits your team. We'll go beyond just the technical capabilities to consider organizational factors like learning curve, maintenance requirements, and overall integration with your existing systems.
GitHub Actions: Convenience over configuration
Following Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub in 2018, GitHub Actions emerged as GitHub’s native CI solution. It began as a simple automation tool, but has since grown into a much more comprehensive platform.
Why GitHub Actions?
- Native GitHub integration. If you're already using GitHub for source control, GitHub Actions provides a built-in experience in which CI workflows live alongside your code, sharing the same permissions model and displaying build results in pull requests.
- Event-driven workflow engine. With GitHub Actions, your repository events (commits, pull requests, releases) automatically trigger defined workflows, which lets you apply automation patterns that respond intelligently to repository activities. Support for parallel execution, job dependencies, and conditional logic are all included.
- Cloud-hosted runners by default. While GitHub offers support for self-hosted runners that you can deploy within your own infrastructure (for example, when compliance requirements demand it), cloud-hosted runners are the de-facto choice and the most common path with GitHub Actions.
Advantages of GitHub Actions
With GitHub Actions, the developer experience fits naturally into your team's existing GitHub-based workflows. The GitHub marketplace also contains over 10,000 pre-built actions (actions are like plugins) that let you apply common patterns without having to write custom code.
You'll also appreciate the reduced operational work. As a cloud-native solution, GitHub Actions eliminates much of the infrastructure management required by self-hosted CI/CD systems like Jenkins. GitHub handles the core infrastructure, updates, and scaling, freeing your team to focus on pipeline development rather than platform maintenance.
In terms of security, GitHub Actions uses GitHub's permission system, making access control fairly straightforward. Secret management is also built into the platform with organization- and repository-level secrets and access controls, automated rotation capabilities, and OIDC integration for federated credentials.
GitHub Actions offers consumption-based pricing with free minutes for public repositories and included minutes in GitHub’s enterprise plans. Self-hosted runners incur no additional costs, giving you the flexibility to manage your own for compute-intensive workflows.
Standardization is also possible with reusable workflows and composite actions, allowing you to create organization-wide CI/CD components that teams can use to reduce duplication. This approach improves consistency and can reduce maintenance overhead across your organization.
Potential challenges with GitHub Actions
The tight integration with GitHub that makes GitHub Actions so convenient can also contribute to lock-in, which could be problematic, particularly if you're using multiple version control systems. You'll also find fewer advanced orchestration features compared to more mature platforms, such as approval gates, deployment windows, and rollback automation.
As your organization scales to hundreds of repositories, workflow management can also become challenging without built-in tools for tracking, analyzing, and governing workflows across repositories. If you're using GitHub Enterprise Server, you'll also experience a feature gap compared to GitHub’s standard cloud offerings.
Finally, GitHub Actions’s resource limits can significantly constrain complex enterprise pipelines. GitHub-hosted runners have fixed specifications and job time limits (6 hours), potentially restricting memory or CPU-intensive workloads. The open marketplace model also introduces security considerations from third-party actions; while GitHub provides several officially supported actions of its own, many workflows rely on community-contributed actions that can introduce security vulnerabilities.
Jenkins: Flexibility over simplicity
Jenkins began as the Hudson project in 2004 at Sun Microsystems, later splitting off to become Jenkins in 2011 after Oracle's acquisition of Sun. The community-driven, open-source nature of Jenkins has helped it maintain relevance for over two decades. Jenkins installations now run an estimated 73 million jobs monthly, with millions of users worldwide.
Why Jenkins?
- Free and open source. As a community-driven project, Jenkins is completely free to use with no license fees or usage-based billing. That makes it an attractive option for teams and organizations that would rather invest in build infrastructure and maintenance than go with a commercial option.
- Distributed build architecture. Jenkins uses a controller-agent model that separates job coordination (handled by the controller) from job execution (handled by the agents). This design allows you to scale horizontally by adding agents and executors to handle variable workloads across different operating systems and hardware configurations — ideal for complex applications that require heterogeneous build environments.
- Pipelines as code. Jenkins pipelines allow you to define your delivery processes as code using a Groovy-based domain-specific language (DSL) that supports both declarative (i.e., structured) and scripted (more programmatic) syntaxes stored in a
Jenkinsfilealongside application code. This approach gives you version-controlled, auditable deployment processes with shared libraries for standardization.
Advantages of Jenkins
Jenkins's massive plugin ecosystem (some 2,000 and counting) lets you integrate with virtually any enterprise tool or workflow and handle many of the common tasks in modern CI/CD workflows.
It also gives you a great deal of flexibility when it comes to customization. Jenkins's adaptable nature allows you to tailor your CI/CD pipelines to specific requirements, supporting custom scripts, proprietary tools, and specialized workflows that might not be possible with more opinionated platforms.
Platform freedom is another advantage. Unlike GitHub Actions, Jenkins works with any source code management system and runs on any infrastructure — both crucial benefits when you're using multiple version control systems or have specific infrastructure requirements.
Finally, the vast Jenkins community has collectively documented solutions for many enterprise use cases, reducing the need to create solutions from scratch. This broad knowledge base, combined with a large pool of talent familiar with Jenkins, can lower the implementation risk for some organizations.
Potential challenges with Jenkins
The immense flexibility of Jenkins often comes at the cost of operational complexity. Maintaining the controller, agents, plugins, and associated infrastructure generally requires dedicated resources and expertise, significantly increasing total ownership costs.
Plugins are also notorious for creating ongoing compatibility and maintenance challenges. Plugin updates, for example, can conflict with each other or with the core Jenkins server (into which they’re installed), requiring careful, often tedious management of your plugin usage. Resource exhaustion is another concern, particularly for large deployments; under load, Jenkins can struggle with memory consumption, disk I/O, and other performance challenges, with many pipelines demanding careful planning around utilization.
The Jenkins UI can also be confusing for newcomers. Its configuration-heavy approach generally requires specialized knowledge, and the organization and usability of the user interface tends to reflect this. It also has limited built-in support for analytics, calling for additional tools, plugins, or custom development to achieve organization-wide visibility.
Lastly, as a Java-based application built on a traditional servlet architecture, Jenkins wasn't really designed for the container-based deployment environments of today. While Jenkins X aims to address some of these limitations, core Jenkins presents challenges if you're moving toward cloud-native architectures.
Which one's best? Key factors to consider
Enterprise integration
As mentioned, GitHub Actions and Jenkins approach enterprise integration differently. Actions integrates seamlessly within the GitHub ecosystem, but has more limited external capabilities. Jenkins, with its extensive plugin ecosystem, connects with almost any enterprise system, but requires more effort when it comes to configuration.
For identity management, GitHub Actions leverages GitHub's permission model with SAML single sign-on support, while Jenkins requires plugin-based integration with enterprise identity providers. In mixed environments connecting to various systems, Jenkins provides more flexibility, while GitHub Actions works best when your team’s already standardized on GitHub.
Performance and scalability
Both platforms can handle enterprise workloads, but their approaches differ significantly. GitHub Actions uses a cloud-first model that attempts to scale automatically, while Jenkins gives you a self-hosted model requiring more manual configuration (though with it, more control). With GitHub-hosted runners, you get fixed specifications with hard caps on concurrency and resource limits. Jenkins provides complete control over these resources, but requires more configuration to handle peak loads efficiently.
Cost considerations
Your total cost equation will vary dramatically between these two platforms. GitHub Actions comes bundled with GitHub Enterprise subscriptions (with additional usage billing), while Jenkins is open-source with no usage fees. Infrastructure expenses are minimized with GitHub-hosted runners, while Jenkins requires infrastructure for both controller and agents.
The most significant cost difference, however, is operational overhead. GitHub’s managed service approach substantially reduces maintenance costs compared to Jenkins, which requires dedicated personnel for updates, security, and performance optimization.
Compliance and governance
For regulated industries, both platforms offer different approaches. GitHub Actions provides integrated audit logs and environment protection rules, while Jenkins enables more customizable compliance workflows through pipeline scripting. Both platforms support secure secrets storage, but Jenkins offers more flexibility with various backend options, by way of the Credentials plugin. For governance processes like approval gates and change advisory boards, Jenkins provides more mature capabilities, while GitHub Actions requires more custom implementation.
Ecosystem and support
The GitHub Actions marketplace contains over 20,000 publicly available actions using a simple, version-controlled repository model. Jenkins's Plugin Index contains over 2,000 plugins and requires a more involved process for submitting new plugins. For support options, GitHub offers enterprise SLAs, while Jenkins relies on community support, with commercial-support options available from providers like CloudBees.
Buildkite: The best of both worlds
If you're finding the choice between GitHub Actions and Jenkins a bit difficult — weighing the modern, developer-friendly experience of GitHub Actions against the flexibility and control of Jenkins — then there's a third option for you to consider: Buildkite offers a hybrid approach that combines the strengths of both Jenkins and GitHub Actions, without their limitations.
Why Buildkite?
With Buildkite, you get a modern, control plane/agent architecture that delivers the best aspects of both of these worlds. For orchestration, you get the reliability of a fully managed, massively scalable cloud service, yet retain full control over the fine tuning your execution environments. That means you don't have to choose between convenience and customization. You can have both.
And unlike the statically defined YAML and Groovy-based workflow definitions of GitHub Actions and Jenkins, with Buildkite, pipelines can be written in any programming language, and even change dynamically at runtime, delivering a level of flexibility that neither GitHub Actions nor Jenkins can offer.
It also eliminates the scaling constraints you'll often face with both platforms. With Buildkite, you can achieve virtually unlimited parallelization with granular concurrency controls, avoiding GitHub's fixed limits and Jenkins's controller bottlenecks. This combination — of highly available control plane and lightweight self-hosted agents — gives you the reliability of a managed service with complete control over your execution environments.
Real-world stories from our customers
Companies switching to Buildkite from Jenkins have achieved some remarkable results:
- Uber cut its monorepo build times in half while handling thousands of daily commits
- Elastic improved Kibana's CI/CD run time by 70%
- Rippling reduced its CI/CD costs by 50% using AWS Spot Instances with Buildkite's flexible infrastructure approach
Making your decision
In developing your CI/CD strategy, the choice of platform often comes down to figuring out how much control you really need. Most teams that use GitHub Actions opt for the convenience of GitHub’s stock, hosted runners, as managing self-hosted runners with GitHub can introduce many of the same operational challenges as Jenkins. Choosing between GitHub Actions and Jenkins (or even its many alternatives) can therefore feel like a choice between purely managed or purely self-managed approaches.
With Buildkite, though, there's a third option: fully managed reliability of the components you’d likely rather not think about (control plane, scalability) combined with complete control over the elements that matter most, like your runners, compute resources, and pipeline flexibility.
Ultimately, your team and organization context will guide your decision. The right CI/CD platform isn't just about technical capabilities — it's about finding the right approach and operational balance that best aligns with your team and organization.
