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GoCD 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

GoCD
Ranking in Build Automation
15th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (15th), Release Automation (8th)
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 GoCD is 1.5%, down from 1.8% 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

RajeshReddy - PeerSpot reviewer
The UI is colorful, but the user experience must be improved
We can see all the pipelines with a simple search. The UI is colorful. The user experience is very rich. The product is very easy to learn if we know a bit of the basics. If we have someone to show us how to use it, it is very easy.
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

"The UI is colorful."
"GoCD's open-source nature is valuable."
"Permission separations mean that we can grant limited permissions for each team or team member."
"The most notable aspect is its user interface, which we find to be user-friendly and straightforward for deploying and comprehending pipelines. We have the ability to create multiple pipelines, and in addition to that, the resource consumption is impressive."
"The automated elements are easy to use and you can put them into your server."
"The most valuable features of Jenkins are the ease of use and the information about how to use the features is readily available on the internet. Additionally, with the solution, I can use other reporting tools, such as Flow."
"Jenkins has a lot of built-in packages and tools."
"Jenkins optimizes the CI/CD process, enhances automation, and ensures efficiency and management of our build and deployment pipeline."
"Continuous Integration. Jenkins can integrate with almost any systems used for application development and testing, with its plugins."
"The most valuable feature of Jenkins is its open source."
"I can install Jenkins for integration from multiple developers and automate application delivery, staging, and production environments."
"We benefit from Kubernetes' ability to autoscale pods and use horizontal pod autoscalers to adjust the number of pods based on metrics like CPU or memory usage, ensuring efficient resource allocation and stability under load."
 

Cons

"It is difficult to assign different access levels because it relies on separate keys for developer and admin access, which could be simplified."
"The documentation really should be improved by including real examples and more setup cases."
"The tool must be more user-friendly."
"The aspect that requires attention is the user management component. When integrating with BitLabs and authenticating through GitLab, there are specific features we desire. One important feature is the ability to import users directly from GitLab, along with their respective designations, and assign appropriate privileges based on that information. Allocating different privileges to users is a time-consuming process for us."
"I think an integrated help button, that respected the context of the change/work in hand, would be a worthwhile improvement."
"Adding support for OIDC and internal user databases simultaneously would improve Jenkins."
"Sometimes you have Jenkins restarting because of OOM errors."
"There are some issues with Jenkins, especially with the SIP job."
"Logging could be improved to offer a clearer view."
"The UI of Jenkins could improve."
"Developer documentation for plugins, plugin development, integrations: Sometimes it’s tricky to do pretty obvious things."
"It would be better if there were an option to remove its Java dependency. This would make it more compatible with other software, and it could be much better. At present, we have to depend on Java whenever we want to deploy agents."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's an open-source and free tool."
"This is an open-source solution and it is inexpensive."
"The solution is one of the lowest costs compared to competitors."
"Some of the add-ons are too expensive."
"Jenkins is open source and free."
"Jenkins is an open-source platform."
"We use the tool's open-source version which is free. There is an enterprise version which is expensive but comes with better support."
"Jenkins is not expensive and reasonably priced."
"Jenkins is a free open-source server."
"There is no cost. It is open source."
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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
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Retailer
12%
Real Estate/Law Firm
7%
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 needs improvement with GoCD?
One area of product improvement is the access control system. It is difficult to assign different access levels because it relies on separate keys for developer and admin access, which could be sim...
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

 

Also Known As

Adaptive ALM, Thoughtworks Go
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Ancestry.com, Barclay Card, AutoTrader, BT Financial Group, Gamesys, Nike, Vodafone, Haufe Lexware, Medidata, Hoovers
Airial, Clarus Financial Technology, cubetutor, Metawidget, mysocio, namma, silverpeas, Sokkva, So Rave, tagzbox
Find out what your peers are saying about GoCD vs. Jenkins and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
848,716 professionals have used our research since 2012.