IBM Rational Build Forge vs Jenkins comparison

IBM and Jenkins are both solutions in the Build Automation category. IBM is ranked #23, while Jenkins is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.1. IBM holds a 0.9% mindshare in BA, compared to Jenkins’s 10.6% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of Jenkins users who would recommend it.

IBM Rational Build Forge

Read 2 IBM Rational Build Forge reviews

437 Views
357 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Jenkins

Read 93 Jenkins reviews

4,377 Views
3,762 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

IBM Rational Build Forge

Jenkins

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: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Rational Build Forge vs. Jenkins

March 2025

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Helped 839,422 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

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 March 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of IBM Rational Build Forge is 0.9%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jenkins is 10.6%, down from 14.0% 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

"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."

"Very good reporting features."

"Very easy to understand for newcomers."

"Jenkins is free and open source."

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

"I can install Jenkins for integration from multiple developers and automate application delivery, staging, and production environments."

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

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

"Distributed execution of build and test jobs."

"The solution is scalable and has a large number of plugins that can help you scale it to your needs."

More Jenkins pros

Cons

"Not user friendly for the layman."

"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."

"Tasks such as deployment, cloning, database switchover, and all other database missions and tasks are being done through Jenkins. If a job does not go through, at times the error message does not clearly indicate what caused the failure. I have to escalate it to the Jenkins DevOps team just to see what caused the failure. If the error message is clear, then I wouldn't have to escalate the issue to different teams."

"I would like to have an integrated dashboard on top of it and a better UX to look at. The dashboard could be better in terms of integration with other tools. We should be able to have a single pane of glass across all the tools that we use where Jenkins is the pipeline. This can be a very good upgrade to it."

"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."

"Jenkins is not an easy solution to use and the configuration is not simple. They can improve the solution by adding a graphical interface that is more user-friendly."

"Jenkins can improve by continuing to add additional plugins for all the new solutions that are coming out within the cloud sphere."

"Jenkins could improve by adding the ability to edit test automation and make time planning better because it is difficult. It should be easier to do."

"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."

"Jenkins is an open-source solution, and people tend to stay on the same version for a long time. When you look for an answer on Google, you often find something that doesn't relate to your implementation. The plugins are both the aspect of Jenkins and also one of the worst because the plugins can have different versions, so it's hard to figure out how to solve the problems."

More Jenkins cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"The pricing for Jenkins is free."

"Jenkins is an open-source platform."

"Jenkins is not expensive and reasonably priced."

"It is an open source."

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

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

"We are using the freeware version of Jenkins."

"We use the tool's open-source version which is free. There is an enterprise version which is expensive but comes with better support."

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…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

23%

Financial Services Firm

17%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Educational Organization

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

18%

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.

See all answers

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

GitLab vs Jenkins

Compared 15% of the time

Harness vs Jenkins

Compared 14% of the time

Bamboo vs Jenkins

Compared 10% of the time

Bazel vs Jenkins

Compared 9% of the time

TeamCity vs Jenkins

Compared 5% of the time

More Jenkins Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Build Automation

March 2025

Download IBM Rational Build Forge product report

Buyer's Guide

Jenkins

February 2025

Download Jenkins product report

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.

Jenkins

Sample Customers

Cars.com

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

Buyer's Guide

IBM Rational Build Forge vs. Jenkins

March 2025

Free Report: IBM Rational Build Forge vs. Jenkins

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