Bamboo vs Buildkite comparison

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Bamboo

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

Bamboo and Buildkite compete in the CI/CD landscape, with Bamboo having an edge in integration capabilities and support for Atlassian products, making it appealing for Atlassian ecosystem users. Buildkite stands out with its ease of setup and cloud environment management, offering deployment flexibility and reduced infrastructure overhead.

Features: Bamboo integrates tightly with Atlassian tools like Jira and Bitbucket, supports automatic branching, and provides flexible configurations for custom build processes. It also supports projects across multiple environments. Buildkite offers effective YAML workflow management, efficient Docker caching, and seamless cloud integration, ideal for containerized environments.

Room for Improvement: Bamboo is noted for its complexity in tool configuration and plugin customization. Users seek better support for branched builds and API coverage. Buildkite could improve in workflow representation, chat app integration, and documentation for third-party support, which currently presents a learning curve for new users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Bamboo supports on-premises and hybrid cloud deployments, appealing to diverse infrastructure preferences, with varied user experiences in support responsiveness. Buildkite excels in public cloud deployment, easing manual infrastructure burden, with community resources and documentation aiding troubleshooting despite less direct support.

Pricing and ROI: Bamboo's pricing, driven by agent numbers, can escalate for large-scale operations, though its robust features often justify the cost. It offers structured pricing but could improve agent cost flexibility. Buildkite's pricing is competitive with a per-user model and self-hosted agent options, offering economic benefits for enterprises. Both tools provide significant ROI through time savings and productivity enhancements, varying by organization needs and usage.

To learn more, read our detailed Bamboo vs. Buildkite Report (Updated: April 2025).

Bamboo vs. Buildkite

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Helped 845,849 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Bamboo

Ranking in Build Automation

6th

Average Rating

7.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Buildkite

Ranking in Build Automation

8th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Featured Reviews

Andrea Carella

DevOps Engineer at Politecnico di Milano

High availability, helpful support, and plenty of plugins available

I have used Google Cloud Platform and Amazon AWS for implementing Bamboo. It is not difficult to complete. The length of time it takes for deployment depends on a lot of variables, such as how the pipeline is deployed and what type of infrastructure is present. However, it typically takes only hours not days. I rate the setup of Bamboo a nine out of ten.

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Prabin Silwal

Senior Engineering Consultant at ASSURANCE IQ, INC.

Has an easy setup phase while also offering good documentation

The problem we are facing sometimes is that we have lots of unit testers, and we have to wait about ten minutes to complete all of those because we want to run or find a way. It's not directly due to the limitation of the tool as well, but when we are running the spec, we want to run those parallelly and decrease the downtime so that our deployment can be faster. I think that one is not possible only due to the it also depends upon the unit test framework as well we are using. When we tried with the multiple test cases in a parallel manner, there were some dependencies, and one over another kept failing. We make those sequential calls. The aforementioned area consists of the issues my company faced while using Buildkite.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The most valuable features of Bamboo are its performance and UI. Additionally, there are a lot of useful plugins, integration with other solutions, such as Bitbucket and Jira, and a helpful online community."

"In my experience Bamboo is scalable."

"It can do the CI pipeline well."

"Bamboo's integration with the rest of Atlassian's tech tools, like Jira, helps manage the end-to-end development and release process."

"The most valuable feature of Bamboo is that it is a good tool for CI/CD integration."

"We use Bamboo to automate all our test builds and deployments. It integrates with tools like the ReportPortal to help us check and evaluate processes. When we initiate commands, it automatically checks for scaling issues or failures related to new code. Based on these evaluations, it provides reports in the ReportPortal, helping us decide whether to implement changes."

"One of the significant benefits of Bamboo is its built-in support for numerous clients and the ability to tailor its capabilities to your specific requirements. This high level of customization enables you to create pipelines that are ideally suited to your needs, making it an invaluable tool for conducting advanced testing."

"It's one of the best solutions in this line of work. We have many Atlassian products. We use Bamboo, JIRA, Service Desk, and some other Atlassian plugins. We like that it's easy to integrate into each other. It's a suite of services."

More Bamboo pros

"Buildkite's UI is particularly intuitive, making it simple to add steps to your pipeline. It also provides detailed logging."

"The product's initial setup phase was easy."

"The tool's flexibility with pipelines gave us a lot of advantages, especially when managing a huge amount of microservices."

"If you join our team, it's very easy to learn Buildkite. We have our own boilerplate, so you can just clone it and add your configuration steps. Plus, we have documentation available to guide you through the process."

"You don't have to set up an agent in Buildkite like in Jenkins."

"What I like best about Buildkite is its workflow management. You define YAML files to specify what needs to be done. The jobs can run based on a schedule, like a cron job, where you set it to run every night or every week. Additionally, you can set up triggers, such as new pushes to a repository."

"It is a stable solution."

"Using Buildkite, it's much easier to manage pipelines. It's straightforward to understand what each pipeline returns, making it easy to edit configurations, such as passwords. Although there is a steep learning curve initially, the overall process is still comprehensible. Additionally, Buildkite offers features like hooks and triggers; for example, an action in the app can automatically trigger a pipeline. These elements can be added to specific pipelines, ensuring the entire process is automated."

More Buildkite pros

Cons

"It would be great if Bamboo could introduce a more containerized deployment model."

"The marketing strategy of Bamboo is an area of concern where improvements are needed."

"One area that could be enhanced is the governance process, particularly with regard to building approvals and transitions between stages. In comparison to other solutions, such as Jira, which features a workflow that supports approval processes, this capability is not natively available in Bamboo. To implement this functionality, integration with other solutions, such as GSM may be necessary. Although some add-ons, such as Adaptavist ScriptRunner, are available in the market to circumvent this limitation, they may not offer the exact functionality needed. Therefore, there is certainly room for improvement in this area."

"Scalability depends on the use case. If it is really a big customer with a lot of tests, it might not be a scalable option for them."

"The solution needs to support more customization in the training. What's offered is pretty generic. They need better training and should offer more guidance."

"It should be much easier to use. It shouldn't require a lot of reading to be able to use it. It should have just two or three screens rather than hundreds of screens requiring a lot of clicking. It also requires a lot of integration. It has a steep learning curve. It takes a lot of time to understand and put in the data. There is also no proper training."

"The performance around the deployment feature could be improved."

"Bamboo could improve by having compatibility with GitLab. It would be better to have this platform for deploying code and storing container registries. Bamboo does not have a container registry. Additionally, there could be more features added."

More Bamboo cons

"I would like to see some improvements in the hooks implementation."

"As a newbie, I think BuildKite has several issues. For example, it can't get the status of a PR once it's closed. The syntax is easy to use, but updating a pipeline requires administrator settings, and viewing pipelines for others isn't straightforward."

"The solution should offer more options for installing an agent and give users the option of having a separate self-hosted or provisioned agent."

"My company has had problems with the tool's parallel running and execution time. The testing framework also has some limitations. The tool cannot do everything."

"It gets very complex if you want the tool to scale automatically."

"There is a need for rework occasionally, and issues like syntax errors can occur multiple times, especially when manual changes are made in AWS or Amazon Connect that are not captured in the code."

"Based on the load, the agents can be scaled up and scaled down, and while they are scaling up, sometimes they just get stuck."

"The product must provide better integration with other tools."

More Buildkite cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten."

"The price of Bamboo is reasonable."

"If Bamboo could provide more flexibility on pricing, that would help. On the agent side, if you want to increase the number of agents it should be less expensive. If they can provide some better pricing model, it will help, whether we are going to use it or are already using it."

"The server products for small teams used to offer excellent pricing. However, Atlassian has since changed the offering and the pricing is more expensive. I do still think the solution offers good value for money."

"There is a subscription required to use Bamboo."

"I rate the solution's pricing a three out of five."

"I don't think the tool is expensive."

"I find Buildkite cost-effective as it has definitely increased my productivity, especially on the deployment side. It saved a lot of my time and improved data management because I can handle different environments myself now."

"For a business plan, it was 19 USD per month per user."

"The self-hosted option is pretty cheap."

"The solution's per-user pricing model suits huge enterprises but is expensive for small to medium businesses."

"Buildkite is known to be cheaper than GitHub Workflows, which is considered a standard in the industry. It can be cost-effective, especially for organizations that heavily utilize Docker and containerization, because every code change triggers a new build. Its integration with AWS, particularly with ECR, and its caching capabilities with layers are powerful features."

"We used the solution’s free version."

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Comparison Review

it_user217035

Senior iOS Developer at a media company with 5,001-10,000 employees

May 27, 2015

Bamboo vs. Jenkins

A biased and subjective comparison of Bamboo and Jenkins as CI servers for mobile development, based on practical experience with both. Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (Delivery, Distribution) has been around for quite a while. But surprisingly enough on a global scale it pretty…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Computer Software Company

12%

Government

12%

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Bamboo?

Bamboo's integration with the rest of Atlassian's tech tools, like Jira, helps manage the end-to-end development and release process.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Bamboo?

I rate the solution's pricing a three out of five.

What needs improvement with Bamboo?

Integrating workflows with other platforms can be challenging. The capabilities of these platforms sometimes fall short compared to others. Initially, it was difficult for us because the plugins we...

What needs improvement with Buildkite?

One area that needs improvement in Buildkite is the requirement for rework of the code. There can be syntax errors when running the Buildkite pipeline, especially if someone has made manual changes...

What is your primary use case for Buildkite?

I use Buildkite for deployment tasks related to building AMI images and deploying routing profile queues into Amazon Connect. This involves using Buildkite in conjunction with GitHub. We create fil...

What advice do you have for others considering Buildkite?

With two years of experience on Buildkite, I would recommend it to others due to its manageable pipeline and the support team available for big issues. I am satisfied with it, rating its stability ...

GitHub Actions vs Buildkite

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Product Reports

Bamboo

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Download Buildkite product report

Overview

Bamboo is a continuous integration and delivery tool that ties automated builds, tests and releases together in a single workflow. It works great alongside JIRA and Stash providing a fully traceable deployment pipeline.

Atlassian

Buildkite is a powerful CI/CD tool praised for its scalability and flexibility in automating and managing complex workflows across multiple platforms. Its integration capabilities with various systems and supports for secure, customizable environments enhance development efficiency and data privacy. The feedback highlights significant boosts in productivity and operational cost reduction, making Buildkite a strategic asset for businesses aiming to streamline development tasks and align with organizational goals.

Sample Customers

Neocleus, MuleSoft, Interspire

Information Not Available

Bamboo vs. Buildkite