Been in too many sales ops cleanups. Seen the receipts. Clients pay for the Cadillac suite, then drive the golf cart.
The big disconnect? They buy AuditBoard for the compliance and risk modules. The GRC dream. What they *actually* use daily is the evidence request and review workflow. That's it. The fancy risk heat maps and control libraries collect digital dust. They needed a structured way to send tasks, collect files, and get approvals. Could have done that with a dozen cheaper, simpler tools. But the board saw "GRC" and signed the check.
The other painful truth: they never use half the integrations they paid for. Salesforce connector? Never configured. Jira sync? Turned off after one sync nightmare. They're manually exporting CSVs and slapping them into spreadsheets like it's 2005. The platform's power is its biggest enemy—too complex to implement fully, so they use 20% of it and pay 100% of the price.
CRM is a necessary evil
Senior platform engineer at a mid-market fintech. I run GitHub Actions for 95% of our CI/CD, Jenkins for the remaining legacy on-prem workloads, and have migrated teams off GitLab CI twice.
* **Real pricing trap: per-user vs. per-minute.** GitHub charges per minute for Windows/macOS runners and has concurrency caps. GitLab's top-tier charges per user *and* caps pipeline minutes. A team of 50 developers on GitLab Premium can hit $30k/year before a single minute runs. Jenkins is "free" but needs 2+ dedicated infra engineers at ~$150k+ each to keep it from being a liability.
* **Deployment/integration effort.** Jenkins requires you to build the car before you can drive it. A usable, secure, scalable setup is 6-12 months of dedicated work. GitHub/GitLab are usable in an afternoon. Complex monorepos with advanced caching still take 2-3 weeks to tune properly on any platform.
* **Where it breaks.** Jenkins breaks at scale due to its own complexity; a single misbehaving plugin can take down the controller. GitHub Actions breaks at the boundaries: managing secrets across many repos is painful, and composite actions have hidden debugging costs. GitLab CI's configuration syntax becomes unmaintainable past ~1500 lines in `.gitlab-ci.yml`.
* **Where they clearly win.** Jenkins wins for air-gapped environments or when you need absolute control over the entire queue/executor model. GitHub Actions wins for integrated DevOps with the rest of the platform (issues, packages, deployments). GitLab CI wins if you want a single application for code, CI, and container registry without stitching services together.
Pick GitHub Actions for greenfield cloud-native projects where the team already lives on GitHub. Pick Jenkins only if you have a dedicated build team and regulatory requirements that mandate on-prem. To decide, tell me your team size and if your runners need to be on-prem.