GoCD vs Jenkins comparison

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GoCD

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

GoCD and Jenkins are competitors in the continuous integration and delivery category. While Jenkins is often preferred due to its extensive feature set and community support, GoCD offers notable advantages in specific areas like pipeline modeling.

Features: GoCD offers customizable pipeline modeling, value stream visualization, and precise workflow control. Jenkins provides a large plugin ecosystem, community-driven support, and flexibility for various tools.

Room for Improvement: GoCD could enhance its plugin support, community-driven features, and advanced customization. Jenkins would benefit from a more intuitive interface, reducing plugin dependency, and streamlining complex setups.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Jenkins's deployment is supported by extensive documentation and community help, making it user-friendly. GoCD offers straightforward deployment but lacks Jenkins's level of community support which may impact troubleshooting speed.

Pricing and ROI: GoCD is attractive for its lower setup cost, making it suitable for budget-conscious organizations. Jenkins involves a higher initial investment but its robust features can lead to a better long-term ROI, supporting complex projects and scalability.

To learn more, read our detailed GoCD vs. Jenkins Report (Updated: December 2025).

GoCD vs. Jenkins

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Helped 879,422 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

GoCD

Ranking in Build Automation

17th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (18th), Release Automation (13th)

Jenkins

Ranking in Build Automation

4th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of GoCD is 2.1%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jenkins is 7.5%, down from 11.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Jenkins	7.5%
GoCD	2.1%
Other	90.4%

Build Automation

Featured Reviews

RajeshReddy

Dev Ops Engineer at Infosys

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.

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Jamshaid I

Principal Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Efficient resource allocation and robust workflow with autoscaling capabilities

In Kubernetes, we use node-based architecture with nodes and pods and follow practices like RBAC and rollback. Multiple pods can run concurrently. 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.

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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 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 UI is colorful."

"Permission separations mean that we can grant limited permissions for each team or team member."

"GoCD's open-source nature is valuable."

"Jenkins can be used for elastic management, if you have any sensitive data or credentials you can use them across the environment. Additionally, the solution is easy to use and can be used across multiple use cases."

"This solution has helped us in automating the build and test process, reducing time."

"The most valuable features of Jenkins are the integration of automatic scripts for testing and the user's ability to use any script."

"The solution is scalable and concurrent users have access to the platform."

"It's very useful when you want to automate different processes from beginning to end."

"GitHub linking is pretty good. We have a deployment application where we can run our tests and add various variables to be passed as assertions to those tests. This is pretty fluid with Jenkins."

"When we have manual tasks, we have to depend on multiple technical teams. With Jenkins, we can bring all the technologies together by the click of a button. We can see results without having to depend on different teams. Jenkins makes life easy for the database and DevOps teams."

"We significantly reduced build times of large projects (more than 80k lines of Scala code) using build time on Jenkins as a time sample. It reduced the developer write-test-commit cycle time, and increased productivity."

More Jenkins pros

Cons

"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."

"The documentation really should be improved by including real examples and more setup cases."

"The tool must be more user-friendly."

"It is difficult to assign different access levels because it relies on separate keys for developer and admin access, which could be simplified."

"The UI must be more user-friendly."

"Better and easy-to-use integration with Docker would be an improvement."

"The onboarding of Jenkins should be smoother, and it should have more pipelines available as it's deployed on many different servers."

"Jenkins could improve by allowing more scripting languages. We need to use Groovy scripting and it is difficult to debug and it is not ideal for creating file scripts. We tried to search for assistance but we did not find much help."

"Sometimes, random errors of metadata are not there, which causes delays. These are essentially gaps in the information being passed to the job."

"Partition security for the workflow of projects is not yet an option."

"It can be improved by including automated mobile reporting integrations."

"The major drawback with Jenkins is the lack of support."

More Jenkins cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's an open-source and free tool."

"This is an open-source solution and it is inexpensive."

"Jenkins is an open-source platform."

"It's free software with a big community behind it, which is very good."

"It is a free product."

"The tool is open-source."

"Jenkins is a free solution, it is open source."

"The solution is one of the lowest costs compared to competitors."

"It could be cheaper because there are many solutions available in the market. We are paying yearly."

"It is free."

More Jenkins pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user184734

Systems Administrator at Facebook

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…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

Educational Organization

University

Financial Services Firm

19%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Computer Software Company

11%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	3

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	28
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	56

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about GoCD?

The UI is colorful.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for GoCD?

The product is free of cost.

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.

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs GoCD

Comparisons

GitLab vs GoCD

Compared 17% of the time

GitHub Actions vs GoCD

Compared 11% of the time

Tekton vs GoCD

Compared 10% of the time

Bamboo vs GoCD

Compared 8% of the time

Compared 8% of the time

More GoCD Competitors

GitLab vs Jenkins

Compared 13% of the time

Harness vs Jenkins

Compared 9% of the time

TeamCity vs Jenkins

Compared 7% of the time

JFrog Pipeline vs Jenkins

Compared 7% of the time

Tekton vs Jenkins

Compared 7% of the time

More Jenkins Competitors

Product Reports

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites

Download GoCD product report

Download Jenkins product report

Also Known As

Adaptive ALM, Thoughtworks Go

No data available

Overview

GoCD is an open source continuous delivery server created by ThoughtWorks. GoCD offers businesses a first-class build and deployment engine for complete control and visibility. It was designed for continuous delivery and the concepts essential to this practice are built in at the core.

Thoughtworks

Jenkins is an award-winning application that monitors executions of repeated jobs, such as building a software project or jobs run by cron.

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

GoCD vs. Jenkins