Head to head
Jenkins vs GitHub Actions
Both platforms are scored with the same methodology and the same category rubric. Nothing on this page is influenced by advertising.
50/100 | 70/100Higher score | |
|---|---|---|
| Category rank | #4 | #1 |
| Confidence | High confidence | High confidence |
| External Reputation | 83 | 92 |
| AI Authority | 29 | 68 |
| Web Authority | 21 | 44 |
| Expert Assessment | 60 | 64 |
| TOP10 User Score | — | — |
| Pricing | 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 | Team $4 USD per user/month for the first 12 months (3,000 CI/CD minutes/month, 2GB Packages storage, web-based support) · free tier: Free plan $0/month forever: unlimited public/private repositories, 2,000 CI/CD minutes/month (free for public repositories), 500MB Packages storage, community forum support; separate 30-day trial covering GitHub Enterprise, Copilot and Advanced Security |
| Pricing model | Open source, self-hosted (no licence fee); no vendor-sold hosted plans | Subscription with bundled allowance plus usage-based metered overage |
| Best for | 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%. | Open-source projects and small-to-mid teams already standardised on GitHub.com running mostly Linux builds near their included minute allowance, who value one control plane for code, review, packages, scanning and CI and can absorb an occasional multi-hour CI stall. |
| Avoid if | 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. | You need CI to survive independently of your SCM or cannot tolerate ten-plus hours of pipeline downtime, you run heavy macOS/iOS build matrices where round-up billing at $0.077–$0.102 per minute bites, you are a mid-sized team whose only requirement is SSO and audit logging, or you need a firm three-year TCO today. |
| Markets | SMB, Midmarket, Enterprise | SMB, Mid-Market, Enterprise, Open Source / Individual Developers |
| 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.