Buildkite vs IBM Rational Build Forge comparison

Buildkite and IBM are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Buildkite is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.2, while IBM is ranked #23. Additionally, 92% of Buildkite users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Buildkite

Read 14 Buildkite reviews

254 Views
99 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

IBM Rational Build Forge

Read 2 IBM Rational Build Forge reviews

434 Views
331 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Buildkite

IBM Rational Build Forge

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

IBM Rational Build Forge and Buildkite are competing products in build and deployment automation. Buildkite is preferred for its flexibility and modern integration capabilities.

Features: IBM Rational Build Forge offers extensive automation capabilities, build management, and sophisticated scheduling. Buildkite provides seamless cloud integration, pipeline configuration, and scalability.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Buildkite has a straightforward deployment model, backed by responsive customer service and community resources. IBM Rational Build Forge offers a complex deployment process with deep integration options and IBM's support.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Rational Build Forge requires a larger initial investment providing high ROI in large operations. Buildkite has an attractive pricing model for small to medium enterprises seeking cost-effective fast deployment.

To learn more, read our detailed Buildkite vs. IBM Rational Build Forge Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite vs. IBM Rational Build Forge

March 2025

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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

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

IBM Rational Build Forge

Ranking in Build Automation

23rd

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Featured Reviews

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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Amy DeLorge

CRM Program Release Manager at Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center

Great reporting features and very functional

The solution could be more user friendly. Trying to train somebody on it can be difficult. If you're in this field, you kind of learn the tools, but trying to show a PM how to find report sheets to pull data was difficult. I had to show them how to write the queries and pull the data that they needed. It's not a layman's solution. If you're working with a programmer or with an architect, you won't have issues trying to relay how to utilize the tool. It was for those who cut the checks where there were problems enabling them to pull the data they required. I guess the answer is DevOps, but it depends on your environment. Just being able to sign into dashboards and get accurate results was my biggest thing with my PMs on my projects. They like charts and pie graphs, the ability to see things at a glance data where they could make decisions on the fly.

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

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

"They have great plugins, scalability, UI, and pipeline options. They also offer webhooks that allow integration with custom setups to send events dynamically."

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

"The solution can be considered as a very well-polished platform with a really great UI."

"The documentation is quite helpful."

"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."

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

More Buildkite pros

"Very good reporting features."

"All features are useful. Our customer doesn't have any complaints about the tool. It works pretty well for what they want and what they need to do."

Cons

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

"Compared to market leaders like Azure DevOps and Jenkins, Buildkite's community is smaller, but they do have some documentation."

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

"The way Buildkite represents workflows can be challenging. It uses Directed Acyclic Graphs, and there's a trade-off between abstraction and understanding what goes wrong when something fails. When a layer of jobs breaks down, it can be difficult to identify the issue at first glance. Additionally, logging can be cumbersome. I prefer GitHub Workflows."

"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."

"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."

"Most of our projects involve both front-end and back-end development. We write the code and then create a file to set up our process, including specifying the tests we want to run. Before deploying to production, we need to install and configure certain things. We need something like Docker Pro, but I'm unsure about that. I'm familiar with the steps for using Buildkite for this process. We start by defining which tests to run."

More Buildkite cons

"Not user friendly for the layman."

"Its logging can be improved. When something goes wrong, it is not always very easy to find the problem. It is hard to identify whether the problem is because of low memory in the server or some configuration in Rational Build Forge. The error logs are not very detailed, and they should provide more information. It should also have more integration with third-party tools. It would be great to have more integration with third-party tools."

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"The self-hosted option is pretty cheap."

"We used the solution’s free version."

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

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

"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."

"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."

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

18%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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...

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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...

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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 ...

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Comparisons

GitHub Actions vs Buildkite

Compared 65% of the time

Tekton vs Buildkite

Compared 35% of the time

More Buildkite Competitors

Jenkins vs IBM Rational Build Forge

Compared 100% of the time

More IBM Rational Build Forge Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite

March 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Build Automation

March 2025

Download IBM Rational Build Forge product report

Also Known As

No data available

Rational Build Forge

Overview

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.

Buildkite

IBM Rational Build Forge is an adaptive execution framework that helps automate and standardize the software assembly process. Rational Build Forge helps teams standardize repetitive tasks, improve software quality and manage compliance mandates. This software scales to 25 seats. Rational Build Forge delivers:
Flexibility - gives developers self-service access to preconfigured build processes from within their integrated development environment (IDE). You can add IBM Rational software products to further enhance automation, reporting and integration.
Productivity - accelerates build and release cycles through iterative development, parallel processes and efficient use of hardware.
Compliance - simplifies compliance management with self-documenting audit trails and role-based security.
Compatibility - increases team efficiency with centralized build and release management using the tools you have today.

IBM

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Cars.com

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite vs. IBM Rational Build Forge

March 2025

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