Head to head
GitLab CI/CD vs Jenkins
Both platforms are scored with the same methodology and the same category rubric. Nothing on this page is influenced by advertising.
60/100Higher score | 50/100 | |
|---|---|---|
| Category rank | #2 | #4 |
| Confidence | High confidence | High confidence |
| External Reputation | 86 | 83 |
| AI Authority | 59 | 29 |
| Web Authority | 21 | 21 |
| Expert Assessment | 62 | 60 |
| TOP10 User Score | — | — |
| Pricing | $29 per user/month, billed annually (Premium) · free tier: Free at $0/user/month, no credit card required: 5 users per top-level group, 400 compute minutes/month, SCM and CI/CD, 10 GiB adjustable storage, Static Application Security Testing; AI features require the GitLab Credits add-on | Not published (no paid plans sold by the Jenkins project) · free tier: Entire product is free — Jenkins core is MIT-licensed and downloadable from jenkins.io/download with no seat or build-minute limits |
| Pricing model | Subscription (per user/month, annual) with credit and usage-based add-ons | Open source, self-hosted (no licence fee); no vendor-sold hosted plans |
| Best for | Engineering organisations that want a single vendor for source control, CI/CD, security scanning and planning, especially those with data-residency or air-gap needs, those willing to run their own runners, and qualifying OSS, education or startup projects eligible for free Ultimate. | Platform or DevOps teams that need on-premise or air-gapped builds, heterogeneous toolchains and unusual pipeline shapes SaaS CI cannot express, and can absorb ongoing plugin and controller maintenance in exchange for zero licence cost — Capterra's reviewer base skews enterprise at 45%. |
| Avoid if | You are a small team without seasoned DevOps staff, need more than 5 free users, want a lightweight CI runner bolted onto an existing stack, require month-to-month or mixed-tier licensing, run heavy CI on GitLab-hosted runners and cannot tolerate hard pipeline stops, or need a firm Ultimate budget before a sales cycle. | You have no platform engineer, your code already lives entirely in GitHub or GitLab where integrated CI is near-zero-ops, you need a vendor with a support SLA and a phone number, or your team is standardised on YAML pipelines with no appetite for Groovy. |
| Markets | SMB, Mid-Market, Enterprise, Public Sector, Open Source, Education, Startups | SMB, Midmarket, Enterprise |
| Founded | — | — |
| Headquarters | — | — |
A higher TOP SCORE means more of the evidence favours that platform on this methodology — it is not a recommendation, and it does not account for your specific requirements. Advertisers are never declared the winner of a comparison.