IBM Rational Build Forge vs Jenkins comparison

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87% willing to recommend

IBM Rational Build Forge

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between IBM Rational Build Forge and Jenkins based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Build Automation solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

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

IBM Rational Build Forge vs. Jenkins

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Helped 832,138 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

IBM Rational Build Forge

Ranking in Build Automation

23rd

Average Rating

9.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Jenkins

Ranking in Build Automation

3rd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of IBM Rational Build Forge is 0.8%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jenkins is 11.0%, down from 14.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation

Featured Reviews

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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Dinesh-Patil

Consultant at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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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

"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."

"The most valuable feature of Jenkins is its open source."

"Jenkins's automation and orchestration features have significantly improved workflows by automating various processes. Initially, it did not support YAML manifesting or GitOps, but recent versions have introduced these capabilities. Now, the tool supports importing manifest files from Git repositories, enabling the implementation of GitOps pipelines. Compared to other tools like GitLab, it has become a mature tool for running CI/CD pipelines."

"Configuration management: It is so easy to configure a Jenkins instance. Migrate configuration to a new environment just by copying XML files and setting up new nodes."

"It is a stable solution."

"Automation of chores like deployment, frequent manual tasks (like running scripts on test and production systems) reduced the time used and the number of errors made by engineers, freeing them to do meaningful work instead."

"Jenkins is very customizable."

"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."

"Jenkins optimizes the CI/CD process, enhances automation, and ensures efficiency and management of our build and deployment pipeline."

More Jenkins pros

Cons

"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."

"Not user friendly for the layman."

"The bug fix speed is very slow."

"Its schedule builds need improvement. It should have scheduling features in the platform rather than using external plug-ins."

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

"In our case, we have several products built using Jenkins. It is quite difficult to navigate into the latest stable build in a given OS."

"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."

"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."

"Jenkins can sometimes run slow, especially when restarting after a plugin installation or when returning from a pipeline view to the dashboard."

"Jenkins is an old product, and we encounter performance issues and slow response. Also, some of the plugins are not stable."

More Jenkins cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"Jenkins is an open-source tool."

"Jenkins is a free open-source server."

"Some of the add-ons are too expensive."

"Jenkins is open source."

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

"We are using the freeware version of Jenkins."

"It is a cheap solution."

"Jenkins is open-source, so 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

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

18%

Manufacturing Company

15%

Educational Organization

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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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...

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What do you like most about Jenkins?

Jenkins has been instrumental in automating our build and deployment processes.

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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.

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Comparisons

No data available

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Compared 16% of the time

Harness vs Jenkins

Compared 13% of the time

Bamboo vs Jenkins

Compared 12% of the time

Bazel vs Jenkins

Compared 9% of the time

TeamCity vs Jenkins

Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Build Automation

Download IBM Rational Build Forge product report

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Also Known As

Rational Build Forge

No data available

Overview

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

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

Cars.com

Airial, Clarus Financial Technology, cubetutor, Metawidget, mysocio, namma, silverpeas, Sokkva, So Rave, tagzbox

IBM Rational Build Forge vs. Jenkins