Replace Jenkins

It’s time to fire the butler

Accelerate the path to production with CI/CD honed for AI-assisted speed and volume. World-class teams standardize on Buildkite to boost productivity.

Buildkite powers the most demanding and sophisticated software companies in the world.

Eliminate the toil of operating control planes

Buildkite platform

Less…

  1. Juggling controller and agent ratios.
  2. Backing up databases and configuration files.
  3. Working weekends to run upgrades.

More…

  1. Using a highly available SaaS control plane with a 99.95% uptime SLA
  2. Optimizing your build environment to improve build times.
  3. Zero-downtime upgrades managed by Buildkite.

Buildkite provides scalable orchestration that fits our security and performance needs really well

Valera Zakharov
Valera Zakharov
Senior Staff Engineer, Slack

Auto-scale to 100,000+ agents for peak times

Scale to thousands of agents

Less…

  1. Slow builds.
  2. Waiting for builds to start.
  3. Being limited by concurrency restrictions.

More…

  1. Running steps in parallel for faster builds.
  2. Auto-scaling agents that reduce build start times.
  3. Insights into agent and build queue utilization.

Migrating from Jenkins to Buildkite allowed us to scale to 40,000,000 minutes of CI builds each month.

Yohan Hartanto
Yohan Hartanto
Staff Engineer, Uber

Integrate using plugins that can’t crash the system

Less…

  1. Unmaintained and abandoned plugins.
  2. Six-month upgrade projects wrangling plugin incompatibilities.
  3. Working on bloated plugins in JVM languages.

More…

  1. First-party support for crucial plugins.
  2. Plugins scoped to pipeline steps, allowing multiple plugin versions to coexist.
  3. Small, low-maintenance plugins written in your language of choice.

Govern any workflow from one dashboard

Visual displaying a range of technologies and a flight control tower

Less…

  1. Jenkins sprawl as teams create new instances and add controllers.
  2. Drifting conventions and best practices.
  3. Inflexible plugin policies across whole Jenkins instances.

More…

  1. Unified views across pipelines, projects, and compute.
  2. Flexibility to implement best practices in your language of choice, injected throughout the pipeline lifecycle.
  3. Secure boundaries around pipelines, agents, projects, and more to manage disparate workflows.

Adopt the tools and security you need

Flexible for the tools and security you need

Less…

  1. Being blocked from new tools and techniques because they’re not supported or require a plugin.
  2. Worrying about how to handle the next Jenkins CVE.
  3. Creating and maintaining specific compute for every pipeline.

More…

  1. Flexibility to use the best cloud, compute, and supporting technologies—Kubernetes, Spot Instances, Bazel, and whatever comes next.
  2. Retaining full control of the build environment with self-hosted agents for high-security and compliance workflows.
  3. Running CI work like building and testing on fast, generalized compute managed by Buildkite.

Key features

Dynamic pipelines

Dynamic pipelines let you customize pipeline steps on the fly to reduce run times and react to changing scenarios—from adding new steps to triggering different pipelines. All with logic you write in your programming language of choice.

Monorepo builds

Monorepo builds selectively build parts of your codebase depending on what changed. Use our official plugin, or use dynamic pipelines to implement your own build and testselection strategy.

Annotations

Annotations highlight key information in custom blocks so developers can quickly understand the situation, such as test result summaries, graphs of codebase analyses, and links to artifacts.

Built by developers, for developers

  1. SOC 2 Type II compliant.
  2. Audit logs.
  3. Multi-level permissions to control access.
  4. REST and GraphQL APIs.
  5. SSO, SAML, and 2FA.

Problems with legacy tools

First-generation tools can’t keep up with today’s needs

Buildkite

Jenkins

Reliable uptime
99.95% uptime SLA for the control plane.
Frequent downtime from control plane crashes, version upgrades, and maintenance.
Unlimited scale
Large customers connect 100,000 concurrent agents for blazing-fast build times.
Theoretically unlimited, but
extremely resource-intensive and expensive to scale.
Polyglot tooling
Work in your language of choice.
Forced to use awkward languages like Groovy.
Dedicated support
Premium support with knowledgeable staff around the world.
Community support with many plugins abandoned and not maintained.
SaaS and self-hosted
SaaS control plane and options for
hosted or self-hosted agents.
On-premises only.
Modern UI
Built to help users quickly understand what’s going on.
Outdated and confusing.

Software delivery in the era of generative AI

Legacy tools simply can’t handle the volume and velocity of AI-assisted code creation and become bottlenecks.

Continue reading →

Customers

Teams work better with Buildkite

Elastic

Elastic improves Kibana CI/CD run time by 70% after switching to Buildkite Pipelines

Elastic decreased pipeline run time from 3 hours to 55 minutes while improving developer experience and decreasing costs by migrating to Buildkite.

Read the case study

Frequently asked questions

Got a question that’s not on our list? Want a demo? Just want to chat? Get in touch.

No, you set your own limits with self-hosted agents. Buildkite handles upwards of 100,000 concurrent agents from some customers.

Buildkite provides an SLA of 99.95% uptime and a status page to track any incidents.

Migration times depend on the number and complexity of your pipelines. We recommend derisking migrations by breaking them into milestones and choosing a key pipeline to start with. Many teams start with the most critical or expensive pipeline or a new project. They then establish paved roads to help other teams move to Buildkite.

Buildkite also offers professional services to support your migrations. Contact support to learn more.

Yes! All new organizations get a 30-day free trial of the Pro plan to try the key features. See Pricing for all the details on the plans.

No, Buildkite cannot be fully self-hosted. While you can run the build infrastructure on self-hosted agents, the control plane is a SaaS offering managed by Buildkite.

This setup eliminates the overhead of maintaining and scaling the control plane, allowing your team to focus on delivering quality code quickly and efficiently. Self-hosted agents provide many benefits of an on-premises deployment with security, compliance, and governance controls.

Yes, Buildkite supports lightweight plugins to integrate with popular tools, but with significant improvements over Jenkins. Unlike Jenkins plugins, Buildkite only executes plugins on agents, ensuring the control plane remains stable and secure.

This approach prevents crashes and reduces downtime. Teams can also use multiple versions of a plugin without impacting each other.

Resources

Guides to improve your practices

Start turning complexity into an advantage

Create an account to get started with a 30-day free trial. No credit card required.

Buildkite Pipelines

Platform

  1. Pipelines
  2. Pipeline templates
  3. Public pipelines
  4. Test Engine
  5. Package Registries
  6. Mobile Delivery Cloud
  7. Pricing

Hosting options

  1. Self-hosted agents
  2. Mac hosted agents
  3. Linux hosted agents

Resources

  1. Docs
  2. Blog
  3. Changelog
  4. Webinars
  5. Plugins
  6. Case studies
  7. Events

Company

  1. About
  2. Careers
  3. Press
  4. Brand assets
  5. Contact

Solutions

  1. Replace Jenkins
  2. Workflows for AI/ML
  3. Testing at scale
  4. Monorepo delivery

Support

  1. System status
  2. Forum