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: February 2026).

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GoCD vs. Jenkins

February 2026

Helped 882,594 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 February 2026, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of GoCD is 2.3%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jenkins is 7.2%, down from 11.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Jenkins	7.2%
GoCD	2.3%
Other	90.5%

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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Kumar Shivam

Site Reliability Engineer 2 at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

Automation has transformed our delivery pipeline and saves time by removing manual deployment work

While Jenkins is powerful, many teams face pain points and limitations. The biggest area where Jenkins could improve, based on real DevOps use cases, is messy plugin management, which is one of the biggest complaints. Jenkins relies heavily on plugins, which is both its strength and its weakness. The problem is there are too many plugins, and version conflicts can arise between them. Updates sometimes break pipelines, which is a real pain point. For instance, if you update a Docker plugin, the pipeline could suddenly fail. Many times, using tools such as Docker or Kubernetes leads to plugin compatibility issues. Here, improvements are needed for better plugin stability, automatic compatibility checks, and a simpler update process. The second pain point is that the UI is outdated and complex. Jenkins' UI feels old compared to modern DevOps tools, making it not very user-friendly for beginners, and difficult to find settings. Job configuration is also confusing, and the dashboard looks outdated. Improvements are needed for a modern, cleaner interface, easier navigation, and better pipeline visualization. Additionally, scaling Jenkins is difficult in large companies running many pipelines, causing the Jenkins master to become slow with high CPU and memory usage, leading to build queue delays. Agent management becomes complex, and teams using cloud solutions such as AWS often require extra configuration for scaling. Improvements are necessary for better cloud-native scaling, auto-scaling agents, performance optimizations, and easier distributed setups.

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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 is particularly valuable since it saves time by automating manual tasks."

"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."

"The most valuable features of Jenkins are creating builds, and connecting them with Sonar for Sonar analysis. Additionally, we connect it with other vulnerability tools, such as WhiteSource which is useful."

"It's a powerful tool for CI/CD."

"Has enabled full automation of the company."

"Jenkins integrates with multiple tools like Bitbucket and makes life easier. We don't have to write a lot of code since a lot of libraries are available."

"After Jenkins' automation, the full pipeline runs in 10 to 20 minutes without manual work, running automatically after a code push, saving time, reducing manual effort by over 80%, and accelerating release cycles from weekly to daily and even multiple deployments per day."

"The deployment of traditional Jenkins is easy."

More Jenkins pros

Cons

"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."

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

"The enterprise version is less stable than the open-source version."

"Upgrading and maintaining plugins can be painful, as sometimes upgrading a plugin can break functionality of another plugin that a job is dependent on."

"There are some issues with Jenkins, especially with the SIP job."

"It does not have a very user-friendly interface."

"Logging could be improved to offer a clearer view."

"Jenkins relies on the old version of interface for configuration management. This needs improvement."

"Jenkins can be improved, but it's difficult for me to explain. The initial setup could be more straightforward. If you connect Jenkins with bookings and lockouts, it can be challenging."

"This solution could be improved by removing the storage of unnecessary data such as the history of test deployments that were unsuccessful."

More Jenkins cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"We are using the free version of Jenkins. There is not a license required to use the solution because it is open-source."

"Jenkins is an open-source tool."

"There is no cost. It is open source."

"This is an open-source solution for the basic features. However, if an organization wishes to include specific functionality, outside of the basic package, there are extra costs involved."

"The solution is open source."

"Jenkins is open source and free."

"It is a free product."

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

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

11%

Educational Organization

Financial Services Firm

University

Financial Services Firm

18%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Computer Software Company

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	57

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about GoCD?

The UI is colorful.

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...

What is your primary use case for GoCD?

The solution helps us deploy microservices across multiple environments.

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.

Digital.ai Agility vs GoCD

Comparisons

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Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

Buildkite vs GoCD

Compared 6% of the time

Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 12% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

TeamCity vs Jenkins

Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

Bazel vs Jenkins

Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites

January 2026

Download GoCD product report

Download Jenkins product report

February 2026

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