Buildkite vs Depot
Depot makes builds fast on infra it designs. Buildkite gives you a system you design yourself;your compute, your architectures, your pipeline logic.
Depot is very good at remote container builders. If slow Docker builds are your problem, Depot is aimed directly at it — and you can run Depot inside Buildkite.
Buildkite is a different purchase. It is a CI platform you configure: agents on your own infra or ours, any OS and any chip, pipeline steps generated at runtime, test intelligence and registries in the same system, with governance built for the whole system rather than bolted to the edge of it.
- Choose Buildkite: when CI has become a system worth designing, and it has to hold across every architecture and team you have.
- Choose Depot: when build speed and caching are the singular problem, and a managed engine is what you want.
The short version
What Buildkite is built for
- Run on your infrastructure, Buildkite’s, or both
- Build on any operating system and any chip — your own Macs and GPUs
- Generate pipeline steps at runtime, not ahead of time
- Keep test intelligence and registries in the same system
- Start free, with governance that covers the whole system
What Depot is good at
- Container builds that are genuinely fast, with native Intel and Arm
- A persistent cache shared between CI and local machines
- A managed CI engine with per-second billing and fast job starts
- Usable from any CI, including Buildkite
- Flat plan pricing with unlimited users
Feature comparison
By capability, not bias. Where Depot is the better choice, we say so.
| Capability | Buildkite | Depot |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A CI platform: orchestration, test intelligence, registries and governance in one system. | Build acceleration — container builds, cache and registry — plus a CI engine and hosted GitHub Actions runners. |
| Where it runs | Agents on your infrastructure, on-prem or any cloud, or Buildkite-hosted. The agent connects outbound-only, so source and secrets stay in your environment. | Depot's cloud by default, in US and EU regions, on builders never shared across organisations. Depot Managed puts the data plane in a single-tenant sub-account inside your own AWS organization, on the Business plan; AWS today, with GCP described as under consideration. |
| Architectures and OS | Linux, macOS, Windows, Arm and GPU, on your own hardware or hosted compute. | Depot CI runs x86_64 sandboxes, 2–64 vCPU, Ubuntu 24.04 by default. Their docs put it plainly: “Depot CI doesn't provide sandboxes for Arm, macOS, or Windows.” Those targets are served by their separate GitHub Actions runners product. |
| Build speed | Speed from orchestration: build only what changed, and fan out as wide as your infrastructure allows. | Purpose-built for this — “up to 40x faster” by their own measure, emulation-free Intel and Arm, and an NVMe layer cache of 50GB by default, expandable to 500GB. |
| Caching and build environment | Persistent agents: the working directory stays warm and the git mirror is local, so checkouts don’t start from zero. Cache and git mirror volumes on hosted compute from Pro. On your own agents, caching beyond that is yours to design. | Depot Cache is one remote cache used from CI and local machines on every plan, covering Bazel, Gradle, Go, Turborepo, sccache, Pants and Maven. A real strength — and it works from Buildkite. |
| Pipeline model | Steps generated at runtime in Go, Python or bash, so the build adapts to the commit. | GitHub Actions YAML, migrated into .depot/workflows/. Depot calls it “the first frontend to the engine, not the only one”, and documents the compatibility boundaries. |
| Test intelligence | Splitting by timing, flaky detection, test state management with auto-quarantine, and ownership mapped to teams via a TESTOWNERS file. | JUnit ingestion, org-wide analytics, timing-based splitting and a “possibly flaky” signal, with 1,000,000 passing test results included on every plan. |
| Artifacts and registries | Registries across 13 package ecosystems — npm, Maven, Gradle, PyPI, NuGet, RubyGems, deb, RPM, Alpine, Helm, Terraform, Hugging Face models, OCI images and generic files. | Depot Registry is an OCI registry for container images and OCI artifacts such as Helm charts and models. |
| Governance and access | SOC 2 Type II on every plan. SSO and signed pipelines from Pro; SCIM, custom SAML, audit log exports and private log storage on Enterprise. | Two roles, owner and member, with invitations available on Startup and Business. SSO with SAML and SCIM is a $500/month add-on on Startup and included on Business. Audit logging is Business only, viewed in a WorkOS portal with 30-day default retention and streamable to your own SIEM. Their published compliance statement is SOC 2 Type I, with the report shared on request. |
| Reliability commitment | 99.95% platform uptime and 99.5% hosted-agent uptime, in a published SLA. | Depot Managed “comes with the full support and SLA of the Depot Business plan”. |
| Pricing model | $0 Free · $30 per active user/month Pro · Enterprise custom. Self-hosted agents $3.50/month beyond the 10 included on Pro; hosted compute metered per vCPU-minute (pricing). | No free plan. A 7-day trial, then $20/month Developer for one user or $200/month Startup for unlimited users, plus Business custom. Compute is metered on top: Depot CI at $0.00005 per vCPU-second, container builds from $0.04/minute, cache and registry storage at $0.20/GB/month (pricing). |
Your GitHub Actions workflows already run on Buildkite
Depot CI runs GitHub Actions YAML, so if you are on Depot CI your pipelines are GitHub Actions workflows. Those same workflows run on Buildkite — unchanged — through our open source GitHub Actions compatibility plugin, which is MIT licensed and in public preview.
No GitHub Actions run is created and nothing is written back to your repo. Buildkite owns scheduling, logs, retries and cancellation, and imported workflows run alongside native Buildkite steps, so you can move pipeline by pipeline instead of all at once. On the Free plan it costs nothing to find out whether your workflows fit.
Works today:
- Linux x86-64 and native macOS arm64 jobs.
- JavaScript and composite actions; Dockerfile actions on Linux.
- Static matrices,
needsand outputs. actions/checkout,actions/cache, upload and download artifact at audited versions.- Job-scoped
GITHUB_TOKEN, and statically named secrets as Buildkite secrets. - Linux job and service containers, pull-request path filters, private repositories, local reusable workflows.
Not yet:
- Windows, Linux arm64, macOS x86-64, GitHub Enterprise Server.
- Dynamic matrices derived at runtime.
- Private actions and private reusable workflows.
- Push path filters,
docker://actions,secrets: inherit.
It’s a preview and the boundaries are real. Check the compatibility matrix against your workflows rather than assuming a fit — and if you’d rather not do that alone, we’ll validate one with you.
Where the difference actually shows up
Depot optimises a build. Buildkite optimises the system around builds. Both are legitimate; they are answers to different questions.
- The work stops being x86 Linux. Depot CI runs x86_64 sandboxes — their words, not ours. The moment CI includes iOS, Windows, Arm-native or GPU work, that work lives on their separate GitHub Actions runners product. On Buildkite an agent is a binary: it runs on your Macs, your GPU boxes and your Windows fleet, under one control plane.
- The pipeline stops fitting in YAML. Depot CI executes GitHub Actions YAML. That is a deliberate and sensible on-ramp, and for a lot of pipelines it is plenty. Buildkite generates steps at runtime in Go, Python or bash, so a monorepo can decide what to build from the diff rather than accumulating workflow files and path filters.
- The organisation starts asking who can do what. Depot has two roles, owner and member; SSO is a $500/month add-on until the Business plan, and audit logging is Business only, though it streams to your own SIEM once you have it. Buildkite has SSO and signed pipelines from Pro, and SCIM, custom SAML, audit log exports and private log storage on Enterprise. Our governance is tiered too — the difference is where the line sits and how much of the system it covers.
Buildkite asks for deliberate setup up front, and gives you a system you extend rather than replace when the work changes shape.
What a migration benchmark is actually measuring
When a team reports that CI got twice as fast after moving platforms, more than one thing usually changed. Reading which is the difference between a useful real-world number and a vanity metric.
Three variables tend to move together in these stories, and only one of them is the CI platform:
- The compute changed. Migration numbers are very often baselined against a self-managed runner fleet — someone’s own instances, spot interruptions, per-team queues, capacity planning nobody wanted to own. Moving that onto managed compute is a large and real improvement. It measures what not running a fleet is worth, not what a different orchestrator is worth. Buildkite hosted compute answers exactly the same problem, and self-hosting on Buildkite is a choice rather than a requirement.
- The pipeline was rewritten. A workload converted from one config format to another on its way to new hardware has changed twice. Whatever the resulting number is, it can’t be attributed to either change on its own.
- The cache changed. Caching is usually the single largest lever in a slow pipeline, and it almost always gets redesigned during a migration. A faster run after a cache redesign is a fact about the cache.
Apply the same reading to this page. The only comparison worth acting on is the same workload, on the same class of hardware, with the same cache strategy. That’s why we would rather run yours than quote someone else’s.
Use Depot with Buildkite, or move off Depot CI
This isn’t either/or. Depot’s build acceleration works from any CI, and Buildkite is one of the integrations they document themselves.
- Keep Depot for container builds and caching, and run
depot buildinside Buildkite pipelines. It’s a CLI install plus a build step, with OIDC as their recommended auth. - Move off Depot CI onto a platform built for scale: dynamic pipelines, test intelligence, registries and governance, on infrastructure you choose.
- Move incrementally. Run both, cut across pipeline by pipeline, and keep the fast container builds while you do it.
Low regret either way: the Buildkite agent is open source under MIT, the compute is yours, and the pipelines are code you own.
Platform teams running Buildkite at scale
Figures below combine Buildkite’s own capacity benchmarks with results from customer case studies.
concurrent agents across enterprise customers
Elastic cut Kibana CI run time by 70%; Shopify by 75%
of YAML gone at Reddit, with two engineers building most of the iOS and Android pipelines
Cost breakdown
The two pricing models are shaped differently. Which one is cheaper depends on your team size and how much compute you burn.
Buildkite prices the platform per active user, with compute on top:
Free:
- Up to 5 users, 10 concurrent jobs
- 2,000 Linux vCPU-minutes and 250k test executions per month
- Dynamic pipelines included
Pro:
- Up to 50 users
- Up to 250 concurrent agents, 10 included, $3.50 per agent/month after
- 4,000 Linux vCPU-minutes, plus M4 Mac agents and larger machine sizes
- 1M test executions per month
Enterprise:
- Unlimited users on a 30-user minimum
- 99.95% uptime commitment
- Custom limits and enterprise support
Every plan starts with a 30-day all-access trial. No credit card needed. View pricing →
Depot prices the plan flat and meters the compute:
- No free plan. A 7-day trial, then $20/month for one user on Developer, or $200/month for unlimited users on Startup
- Included each month on Startup: 5,000 Docker build minutes, 20,000 Depot CI minutes, 20,000 GitHub Actions minutes, 250GB of combined cache and registry storage, and 1,000,000 passing test results. Developer includes a tenth of that compute and 25GB, with the same 1M test results
- Beyond that: Depot CI at $0.00005 per vCPU-second, GitHub Actions runners at $0.004/minute, Docker builds from $0.04/minute, storage at $0.20/GB/month. Billed per second, with no one-minute minimum
Buildkite plan figures read from buildkite.com/pricing on 17 August 2026.
Depot plan prices, included allowances and metered rates: depot.dev/pricing , read the same day.
Where your builds run
Buildkite makes flexible, persistent execution the default, and keeps the sensitive parts on your side of the line.
- Buildkite: self-hosted agents make outbound HTTPS connections only, with no inbound ports to open. Our architecture docs put it plainly — source code and secrets “remain within your environment and are not seen by the Buildkite Platform”. Or use Buildkite-hosted compute; your choice, on any plan.
- Depot: builds run on Depot-operated infrastructure in US and EU regions by default, on builders never shared across organisations. Depot Managed runs the data plane in a single-tenant sub-account inside your own AWS organization on the Business plan; AWS is the only cloud today.
Who answers when something breaks (and what customers say about it)
When delivery is strategic, support matters as much as features. Buildkite gives you direct access to the people who built it, not a tiered helpdesk. G2 and PeerSpot customers called it fast, responsive, and knowledgeable.
G2 rating, where reviewers cite responsive, knowledgeable support
The honest trade-off
If your main pain is container build speed, Depot is good at exactly that.
- Depot’s remote builders and shared cache are fast, and they work from any CI, including this one.
- Depot CI is a well-built managed engine with per-second billing, and if your work is x86 Linux containers it may be all you need.
Come to Buildkite when the problem is the system rather than the build, or when you work broader than Linux: when CI spans architectures Depot CI doesn’t run, when the pipeline needs to be generated rather than written, when access control has to answer to an auditor, or when the compute needs to sit on your own infrastructure on any cloud.
Choose Depot if…
- Slow Docker builds or cache misses are the specific, measurable problem.
- You want native multi-arch container builds without emulation, with very little setup.
- Your CI work is x86 Linux, and you’re happy on a managed cloud.
- You have a large team, and flat per-plan pricing with unlimited users suits you better than per-seat.
- You want to accelerate the CI you already have rather than change platforms — in which case run Depot inside it.
It depends on your situation
The decision usually comes down to four things.
| Capability | Lean Buildkite | Lean Depot |
|---|---|---|
| Your actual problem | CI has become a system: orchestration, testing, artifacts, governance. | Build speed and caching, with the rest of your CI fitting fine. |
| Architectures and hardware | iOS and macOS on your own Macs, Windows, Arm-native, GPU — one control plane over all of it. | x86 Linux containers — the sweet spot Depot CI is designed for. |
| Whose infrastructure | Any infrastructure, on-prem or any cloud, agent outbound-only — or Buildkite-hosted. Your choice, on any plan. | Depot’s cloud, or your own AWS sub-account on the Business plan. |
| Governance and access | SOC 2 Type II with a public trust site, SSO and signed pipelines from Pro, SCIM and audit log exports on Enterprise, and a published SLA. | Two roles, SSO as a paid add-on until Business, audit logging on Business — enough for many teams. |
Frequently asked questions
Got a question that’s not on our list? Want a demo? Just want to chat? Get in touch.
Is Buildkite a Depot alternative?
Partly. They overlap on running CI jobs, but Depot’s centre of gravity is build acceleration. If build speed is your pain, Depot can sit inside Buildkite rather than replace it.
Can I use Depot with Buildkite?
Yes. Depot documents the integration themselves: install the Depot CLI in your pipeline and run depot build, authenticating with OIDC. Many teams do exactly that.
Isn’t a Buildkite pipeline a lot of YAML?
It is if you write it that way. Buildkite steps don’t have to be a static document — a pipeline can be generated at runtime by a program in Go, Python or bash, so a monorepo decides what to run from the diff instead of accumulating near-duplicate config. Teams that treat it as static YAML get static YAML, and at monorepo scale that sprawls. The architecture supports the other approach; adopting it is a deliberate choice.
We’re on Depot CI. How hard is it to try Buildkite?
Not very, because Depot CI runs GitHub Actions YAML. The same workflows run on Buildkite through the compatibility plugin, in public preview and open source under MIT. Start on the Free plan, move one pipeline, and compare on your own workload.
Does Depot have test intelligence?
Yes — JUnit ingestion, org-wide analytics, timing-based splitting and a “possibly flaky” signal. Where Buildkite adds layers is what to do about a flaky test once it is found: test state management with auto-quarantine, and ownership mapped to teams via a TESTOWNERS file.
What about governance?
Depot has two roles, owner and member, with invitations on Startup and Business. SSO with SAML and SCIM is a $500/month add-on on Startup and included on Business; audit logging is Business only and streams to your own SIEM. Their published compliance statement is SOC 2 Type I, shared with customers on request. Buildkite is SOC 2 Type II with a public trust site, with SSO and signed pipelines from Pro, and SCIM, custom SAML and audit log exports on Enterprise.
Where does my code run?
With Depot, on Depot’s cloud in US or EU regions by default, or in your own AWS sub-account on the Business plan. With Buildkite, wherever you choose on any plan: self-hosted agents connect outbound-only and keep source and secrets in your environment, or use Buildkite-hosted compute.
Related resources
See it on your pipelines
Bring a repo and a real workload. We’ll show you what the system looks like around your builds, run one of your existing workflows unchanged, and if faster container builds are all you actually need, we’ll tell you that too.
