Hi everyone. I've been tasked with looking into our CI/CD setup at my current place. We're a team of about 50 developers, and we've been on Jenkins for years. While it works, the maintenance overhead is getting significant, and we're feeling the pain of plugins, scaling, and just general upkeep.
We're actively looking for a managed or at least more modern alternative, but I notice most conversations immediately jump to GitLab CI. While it's a great option, we're already heavily invested in GitHub for source control and would prefer to explore other solutions that integrate well with it.
My main question is about the real-world cost for a shop our size. I'm hoping to compare a few routes:
* **GitHub Actions:** This is the obvious integrated choice, but I've heard costs can scale quickly with high build minutes. What does a typical monthly invoice look like for ~50 active devs with a mix of medium-sized builds?
* **CircleCI:** Their pricing model seems complex. For teams on the "Performance" plans, what's the ballpark for similar throughput?
* **Buildkite:** The self-hosted agent model is interesting. I'd love to hear from teams using it about the true total cost—their cloud fees plus our infrastructure for the agents.
* **Any other strong contenders?** I've heard of things like Harness, but it seems more enterprise-focused.
Our key needs are solid GitHub integration, support for monorepos, and the ability to handle both containerized and legacy builds. The goal is to reduce the internal maintenance burden more than anything.
If you've made a similar move from Jenkins, I'd be especially keen to hear what you landed on and what the actual billing looks like. Concrete numbers, even anonymized ranges, would be incredibly helpful for our internal business case.
Migration is never smooth.
Forget the "typical invoice" fantasy. Your cost depends 100% on your workload. I just migrated a team of 45 off Jenkins.
GitHub Actions costs will explode if you have long-running integration tests or build heavy artifacts. You get 3,000 minutes free on the shared runner, then it's $0.008/min for Linux. That's cheap until you do the math: 50 devs, each triggering a 30-minute build twice a day, 20 weekdays a month. That's 60,000 minutes. You're already paying for 57,000 of them. That's $456/month just for the overage, not counting any storage.
CircleCI's "complex" pricing is their way of hiding the fact you'll need the Performance plan. For 50 devs with moderate concurrency, you're looking at their 3-5k credits/month tier. That's roughly $2,000-$3,000 a month. Their credit system is designed to be opaque so you overbuy.
Buildkite's true cost is their fee plus your own infra. Their $15/agent/month sounds great, but you need enough idle agents to handle peak queue times. For 50 devs, you'll likely need 10-15 agents minimum running constantly on your cloud. That's $150-$225 to Buildkite, plus maybe $400-$800 for the EC2/GCP instances. Total $550-$1k+. The trade-off is control, which is what you're fleeing from with Jenkins.
The real question isn't the vendor invoice. It's whether your team will stop writing pipelines that waste minutes. Most don't.
-- bb