TL;DR - use GitHub Actions for general CI/CD since you should be using GitHub anyway - use Jenkins for self-hosted or more powerful / flexible / extensive CI/CD.
- fully hosted
- unlimited build minutes for public projects
- 2,000 free private build minutes for users / orgs
- 50,000 build minutes per month for cloud enterprise Orgs (essentially free - better than paying for CircleCI!)
- optional self-hosted runners - HariSekhon/Kubernetes-configs - github-actions
- Good Integrations:
GITHUB_TOKENautomatically available with tunable permissions- Code Scanning via Sarif file uploads to the Security Tabs of a repo (see
HariSekhon/GitHub-Actions)
- free for public repos
- requires a Security seats license per commit user in last 90 days on top of the GitHub Enterprise user seat license
- PR / issues actions / comments / auto-merges
- GitHub Marketplace - lots of 3rd parties already have importable actions
- no auto-cancellation of older builds
- no auto-retry like Jenkins
retry{} - can't compose environment variables from other environment variables (must use step action workaround, see HariSekhon/GitHub-Actions main.yaml template)
- can't use environment variables in GitHub Actions
with:inputs to imported actions/workflows - can't export environment variables to GitHub Actions / Reusable Workflows
- Secrets must be passed explicitly via
${ secrets.<name> }
- GitHub Actions is fully-hosted so immediately available and bypasses most operational & governance issues where CloudBees is focused
- GitHub Actions is much cheaper - we already have 50,000 build minutes a month essentially for free, and $0.008 per minute thereafter
- Legacy Enterprise licensing just doesn't make sense any more given company estates are increasingly cloud-based
these days
- 2 vendors I was working with were trying to switch based to PAYG licensing model based on my feedback - cloud-native billing can work out to pennies on the dollar
- GitHub Actions also has self-hosted runners, so can operate it at the same cost as Jenkins free, just paying for
your own compute
- many hosted CI/CD providers are offering this in the 2020s now I've noticed with the standardization on Docker and Kubernetes
- GitHub Actions has a much better API than Jenkins
- GitHub Actions has a much better CLI than Jenkins
- GitHub Actions has better/easier integrations
- GitHub Actions is more self-service for developers who are often already using it for their open source projects
- GitHub Actions is supporting open-source projects the most among hosted CI/CD providers by being completely free for public projects, without usage limits, and Jenkins has no comparable hosted counterpart to date
I've had similar feedback from both technical player-managers, developers and DevOps colleagues.
I'd like to see CloudBees build a 100% hosted Jenkins solution with the same billing cost per minute as GitHub Actions, with a whole new clean Rest API and CLI. Self-hosted runners at no cost are pretty important too, both to access internal tooling services as part of CI/CD pipelines as well as to control costs. Some of the other vendors who have tried to limit self-hosted runners to more expensive plans have essentially shot themselves in the foot because they've made themselves economically non-competitive.