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GitHub Actions vs Jenkins comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

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

GitHub Actions
Ranking in Build Automation
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Jenkins
Ranking in Build Automation
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
93
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of GitHub Actions is 11.1%, up from 4.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jenkins is 10.4%, down from 13.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Build Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Muzammil Riaz - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers version control, automated script execution and reduces manual efforts
Its integration and deployment are quite easy. You need to create a YAML file in your project, detailing configurations within this file. It integrates itself, requiring you to specify titles, descriptions, parameters, and a trigger scheduler if needed. Apart from that, it's just a simple YAML file, so there's no need for complex configurations. In one project, I used GitHub to automate an application related to email marketing, focusing on actions for data scraping. This required running scripts daily, sometimes even twice or thrice a day. Manually executing these scripts is inefficient and overly reliant on individual team members. However, by integrating the project with GitHub Actions, we automated script execution. Triggers were set up to initiate the pipeline automatically with every new commit or push to a branch. Additionally, we implemented schedulers to run pipelines at predetermined times, like 9 PM or 2 PM. Another enhancement was executing five tests in parallel through data actions, making the process more robust. GitHub Actions also offers stepwise execution details, greatly aiding in understanding and managing workflows. I have optimized job execution time by running test scripts in parallel and creating multiple pipelines; we've significantly reduced execution times. What could take 50 minutes can be cut down to just 8 to 10 minutes through these optimizations.
Dinesh-Patil - PeerSpot reviewer
A highly-scalable and stable solution that reduces deployment time and produces a significant return on investment
The dashboard needs to be improved. Though the access management and authentication functionalities are present, the dashboard and UI could be more user-friendly. The product has many plug-ins. Users have to go through the documentation to be able to use the product. The UI must be more user-friendly. The information should be available in the dashboard itself. The users shouldn’t have to refer to the documentation. When a user hovers over the elements on the dashboard, it should reveal information about them.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is user-friendly, with clear and organized processes, making it easy to navigate and work with."
"The most valuable features of GitHub Actions include its seamless integration within GitHub, which simplifies the CI/CD pipeline setup. The scalability of using different types of runners—both public and private runners—enhances deployment flexibility."
"It is a very stable solution as we have not faced any issues."
"GitHub Actions can be easily configured, especially for environment variables and secrets. The UI is understandable and user-friendly for setting up CI/CD pipelines. I prefer tools like GitLab, where the pipeline starts quickly and is accessible near the commits for easy access. However, many CI/CD tools are interchangeable due to similar features of GitHub Actions and other similar tools."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is a good product that offers stability and performance."
"Creating workflows in YAML format is straightforward and easy to comprehend. This includes both understanding and writing workflows. Additionally, the downloading aspect for third-party instances can also be easily done. It's worth noting that vulnerability analysis and similar tasks should be part of our automation through data workflows. Furthermore, we can break down our processes step by step, starting from building, then moving on to analysis, testing, and finally deploying in production and the clear environment. All of these tasks can be efficiently managed within this platform."
"The most valuable feature of GitHub Actions is the ability to automate various tasks, such as backups and deployments, to ease the development workflow."
"I am familiar with the entire life cycle of the product."
"It is easy to use."
"Also, the ability to customize these plugins is valuable. Its user-friendliness stands out, especially in its user interface which allows easy installation and configuration."
"The most valuable feature of Jenkins is its continuous deployment. We can deploy to multi-cluster and multi-regions in the cloud."
"It is a stable solution."
"Has enabled full automation of the company."
"I love Jenkins. I like that you work on anything, and you make anything. Jenkins is very important for my team. I am satisfied with the product."
"Jenkins has a lot of built-in packages and tools."
"Jenkins has been instrumental in automating our build and deployment processes."
 

Cons

"The solution's integration capabilities and UI are areas of concern where improvement is required to make the product more user-friendly."
"The UI could be better."
"The main improvement would be to add support for more programming languages and frameworks."
"The reporting capabilities are somewhat limited."
"Sometimes it is quite complex to commit code from our local system to the GitHub repository; creating a folder in GitHub can be tedious."
"There could be more integration options with different platforms."
"Sometimes incremental steps should be taken during deployment instead of trying to execute all tasks simultaneously, particularly when dealing with AWS EKS clusters and Helm charts."
"The main challenge I've experienced is with integration, particularly uploading to OneDrive, which was more complex compared to Google Drive or AWS S3 bucket."
"There are some issues with Jenkins, especially with the SIP job."
"It would be helpful if they had a bit more interactive UI."
"The user interface could be improved, and its reporting capabilities need enhancement. The plugins could be more effective."
"I would like them to provide space for people to have a central node that stores all the logs of workspace information in a distributed fashion to facilitate backup and restoration. Currently, everything is stored on one node, so you need to set up distributed storage or an endpoint that you can use for backing up your information."
"For this solution to be a 10, it has to be a lot more stable. Maybe the public version of Jenkins is stable, but in our case it's not stable."
"There is no way for the cloud repositories to trigger Jenkins."
"The product should provide more visualization as to how many pipelines are performing and how many builds are happening. It should also integrate with Kubernetes and OpenShift."
"A more user-friendly UI for creating pipelines would be helpful."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"For our basic usage, we didn't have to pay."
"Price-wise, GitHub Actions is okay. If I want to use the product's advanced features, then I need to pay the licensing charges for the solution."
"Regarding cost, as an enterprise, we negotiate our license and expenses, so I can't provide a specific rating for that."
"The product is slightly more expensive than some alternatives."
"It's low-priced. Not high, but definitely low."
"It is free and open platform, so I would rate it 1 out of 10."
"The tool's price is okay and reasonable."
"The cost for GitHub Actions may be around $45 dollars per user."
"Jenkins is not expensive and reasonably priced."
"The solution is one of the lowest costs compared to competitors."
"There is no cost. It is open source."
"Jenkins is an open-source platform."
"It is a free product."
"The solution is open source."
"Jenkins is open source and free."
"I used the free OSS version all the time. It was enough for all my needs."
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Comparison Review

it_user184734 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 22, 2015
I generally find TeamCity a lot more intuitive than Jenkins.
Moving to TeamCity from Jenkins At work, we’re slowly migrating from Jenkins to TeamCity in the hope of ending some of our recurring problems with continuous integration. My use of Jenkins prior to this job has been almost strictly on a personal basis, although I pretty much only use Travis…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about GitHub Actions?
I have optimized job execution time by running test scripts in parallel and creating multiple pipelines; we've significantly reduced execution times. What could take 50 minutes can be cut down to j...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for GitHub Actions?
I pay approximately five dollars per developer per month. I created a GitHub organization for managing users.
What needs improvement with GitHub Actions?
GitHub Actions lacks a feature for automating the build process for mobile applications. I currently rely on GitHub Actions for web applications but have to use another tool for mobile apps.
How does Tekton compare with Jenkins?
When you are evaluating tools for automating your own GitOps-based CI/CD workflow, it is important to keep your requirements and use cases in mind. Tekton deployment is complex and it is not very e...
What do you like most about Jenkins?
Jenkins has been instrumental in automating our build and deployment processes.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Jenkins?
Jenkins is used in many companies to save money, especially within R&D divisions, by avoiding the expenses of proprietary tools.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Airial, Clarus Financial Technology, cubetutor, Metawidget, mysocio, namma, silverpeas, Sokkva, So Rave, tagzbox
Find out what your peers are saying about GitHub Actions vs. Jenkins and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
844,944 professionals have used our research since 2012.