Every CI/CD comparison article lists the same features in slightly different tables. They’re not wrong, but they don’t help you make a decision. What actually matters is how these tools behave in real projects with real constraints.
Here’s what we’ve learned from using all of them.
GitHub Actions
Best for: Teams already using GitHub who want minimal setup overhead.
GitHub Actions’ biggest advantage is integration depth. If your code lives in GitHub, Actions eliminates an entire category of configuration work. There are no webhooks to configure, no credentials to sync between systems, no separate platform to maintain alongside your code repository. Pull request workflows trigger automatically when PRs are opened. Branch protections integrate directly with workflow status checks. Deployment environments with approval gates are native features rather than bolted-on additions.
The marketplace ecosystem accelerates development significantly. Need to deploy to AWS? There’s an official action. Setting up code quality checks? Multiple options exist. Most common integrations take a few lines of YAML instead of custom scripting, and the community has built actions for nearly every tool and service you might use. This means your pipelines can focus on what’s unique to your project rather than reinventing common patterns.
The catches:
- Debugging is painful. When workflows fail, you’re reading logs in a web UI that wasn’t designed for detailed troubleshooting. There’s no SSH access to a running job, no interactive debugging, and log output can be truncated or hard to navigate. Simple failures are fine; complex multi-step failures become archaeological expeditions.
- Complex workflows get ugly. Multi-job dependencies, matrix builds, and conditional logic are all possible, but the YAML quickly becomes hard to follow. What starts as a clean pipeline often evolves into something that only the original author can confidently modify.
- Self-hosted runners require effort to manage securely and at scale. If you need runners in your own infrastructure—for security requirements or specialized hardware—you’re taking on operational burden that negates some of the “managed service” appeal.
- Pricing can surprise you. The free tier is generous for public repositories, but private repo minutes add up quickly with active teams. Matrix builds that run tests across multiple environments multiply costs in ways that aren’t immediately obvious.
When it fits: Straightforward build-test-deploy pipelines on projects already hosted in GitHub. Teams that value simplicity and integration over maximum flexibility. Organizations that don’t want to maintain separate CI/CD infrastructure.
GitLab CI
Best for: Teams wanting CI/CD integrated with issue tracking, code review, and deployment in one platform.
GitLab CI represents a different philosophy than GitHub Actions. Rather than being a CI/CD feature added to a code repository, it’s part of a complete DevOps platform designed from the ground up to integrate every stage of software delivery. If you use GitLab for everything—code hosting, issue tracking, merge requests, container registry, package management, and deployments—the integration is genuinely seamless in ways that connecting separate tools never achieves.
The CI configuration syntax is notably cleaner than GitHub Actions for complex pipelines. Stages and jobs have a logical structure that scales better as pipelines grow in complexity. The .gitlab-ci.yml file format handles multi-stage deployments, environment-specific configurations, and complex dependency chains more elegantly. When you need a pipeline with dozens of jobs across multiple stages with conditional execution, GitLab CI’s model often results in more maintainable configuration.
The catches:
- If you’re not all-in on GitLab, you’re maintaining two systems. Using GitLab CI with code hosted elsewhere creates awkward synchronization requirements that negate the platform’s integration benefits.
- GitLab.com has had reliability issues that affected production deployments for many organizations. Self-hosted GitLab requires significant infrastructure investment—it’s a substantial application that demands resources and maintenance attention.
- Some advanced features require expensive tiers. The free and lower-cost tiers are limited in ways that matter for enterprise use cases, and costs scale with users rather than usage.
- The platform changes frequently, sometimes breaking existing workflows in ways that require immediate attention during upgrades.
When it fits: Organizations committed to GitLab as their complete DevOps platform. Teams that want one integrated tool instead of assembling and maintaining integrations between multiple services. Companies that value the consistency of a unified platform over the flexibility of best-of-breed component selection.
Jenkins
Best for: Complex requirements, unusual integrations, or organizations that need complete control.
Jenkins has been the workhorse of CI/CD since 2011, and its longevity comes from genuine capability. The platform can do almost anything you can imagine. Need to integrate with a legacy mainframe system from the 1990s? There’s probably a plugin. Running builds on unusual infrastructure that cloud providers don’t support? Jenkins can run wherever Java runs. Implementing workflows that cloud tools don’t support natively? Jenkins’s scripted pipeline approach lets you write arbitrary Groovy code to handle edge cases.
This flexibility stems from Jenkins’s architecture as an extensible automation server rather than a purpose-built CI/CD tool. The plugin ecosystem covers thousands of integrations, and when plugins don’t exist, you can script whatever you need. For organizations with heterogeneous environments, unusual compliance requirements, or deep technical debt in their build processes, Jenkins often remains the only tool that can accommodate all the constraints.
The catches:
- Maintenance burden is real and ongoing. Upgrades require testing plugin compatibility. Security patches need prompt attention. Infrastructure management—compute resources, storage, networking—falls entirely on your team. This isn’t occasional work; it’s continuous operational responsibility.
- The developer experience is dated. The UI looks and feels like 2011 enterprise software. Configuration is verbose compared to modern YAML-based alternatives. Debugging requires more effort, with logs that aren’t always easy to navigate and no built-in features for common troubleshooting tasks.
- Scaling requires significant infrastructure work. Running Jenkins at scale with distributed agents, proper resource management, and high availability requires expertise and dedicated infrastructure investment.
- Jenkinsfile syntax uses Groovy, which has a meaningful learning curve. The declarative pipeline syntax helps, but complex pipelines often drop into scripted mode where Groovy knowledge becomes essential.
When it fits: Organizations with existing Jenkins investment that works and delivers value today. Projects with requirements that cloud tools genuinely cannot handle—not “might not handle someday” but “cannot handle now.” Teams that need self-hosted control for security or compliance reasons and have the operational capacity to maintain the infrastructure properly.
CircleCI
Best for: Teams that want a managed service with more power than GitHub Actions.
CircleCI occupies a middle ground in the CI/CD landscape—fully cloud-managed like GitHub Actions, but with more configuration flexibility and performance optimization features. The platform was built specifically for CI/CD rather than being added to an existing product, and that focus shows in the quality of execution.
The caching and parallelism features are particularly well-designed. CircleCI’s dependency caching is more sophisticated than GitHub Actions, with better cache key management and restoration strategies that can significantly reduce build times for projects with large dependency trees. The parallelism features let you split test suites across multiple containers intelligently, not just randomly, which matters when your test suite takes long enough that optimization becomes important.
Docker and machine executors give flexibility in build environments that GitHub Actions sometimes lacks. You can run builds in custom Docker images with specific tool versions, or use machine executors when you need full VM access for things like nested virtualization or kernel-level testing.
The catches:
- It’s another service to manage and pay for. Unlike GitHub Actions which comes included with your code hosting, CircleCI is a separate vendor relationship with its own billing, support, and administrative overhead.
- The orb ecosystem, while good, isn’t as extensive as GitHub Actions marketplace. Popular integrations are covered, but more niche tools may require custom configuration.
- Pricing can escalate quickly for resource-intensive builds. The credit-based system can be hard to predict, and teams with large test suites or frequent builds sometimes face surprising invoices.
- Recent data breaches have raised security concerns for some organizations, particularly those in regulated industries where vendor security posture is a compliance consideration.
When it fits: Teams with complex builds that need better performance optimization and flexibility than GitHub Actions provides, but don’t want to manage Jenkins infrastructure. Organizations where build performance directly impacts developer productivity and the investment in a specialized tool pays for itself in faster feedback loops.
The Questions That Actually Matter
Feature comparison tables can list hundreds of capabilities, but most CI/CD tools can handle most pipelines adequately. The differentiating factors are more practical than theoretical. Instead of comparing feature lists, ask these questions:
Where does your code live? If your code is in GitHub, Actions has a natural advantage that’s difficult to overcome. The integration depth, the lack of configuration overhead, and the unified experience create real value. If you’re in GitLab, the same logic applies to GitLab CI. Fighting against your code host to use a different CI system creates friction that compounds over time—webhooks to maintain, credentials to synchronize, context switching between platforms.
How complex are your pipelines? Simple build-test-deploy workflows work adequately on any platform. The differences emerge when complexity increases. Complex multi-stage pipelines with conditional execution, matrix builds across many configurations, and sophisticated deployment orchestration may work better on tools designed for that complexity. GitLab CI and Jenkins handle deeply complex pipelines more gracefully than GitHub Actions, which can become unwieldy as YAML files grow.
What’s your maintenance capacity? Self-hosted options—Jenkins, self-hosted GitHub runners, self-managed GitLab—require ongoing work. Someone needs to apply security patches, manage infrastructure, handle upgrades, and troubleshoot problems. If your team doesn’t have capacity for that work, or if you’d rather spend that capacity on product development, managed services make sense even if they cost more per build minute. The operational overhead isn’t free just because it doesn’t appear on an invoice.
What integrations do you need? Check whether your specific requirements are well-supported on each platform you’re considering. “Has a plugin” and “works reliably in production” are different things. If you need to integrate with unusual tools, legacy systems, or specialized infrastructure, do the research to verify that integration actually works well—not just that it exists in a marketplace.
What do your developers already know? Familiarity reduces friction in ways that are easy to underestimate. If your team knows Jenkins deeply, there’s genuine value in staying with Jenkins even if theoretically better options exist. The productivity loss during a transition, the debugging time when things don’t work as expected, and the institutional knowledge that has to be rebuilt all have real costs.
Our Typical Recommendations
After working with all of these tools across various client projects, patterns have emerged for which tool fits which situation best:
Small teams, new projects, code in GitHub: Start with GitHub Actions. The integration is seamless, the learning curve is gentle, and it handles the vast majority of build-test-deploy needs without introducing additional complexity. You can always migrate later if you outgrow it, but many projects never do.
Organizations standardizing on GitLab: Use GitLab CI. Fighting the platform to use a different CI system creates more problems than it solves. The integration benefits of staying within the GitLab ecosystem outweigh whatever advantages an external tool might offer, and you avoid the complexity of managing connections between systems.
Complex enterprise requirements: Carefully evaluate whether Jenkins’s flexibility genuinely justifies the maintenance burden, or whether you can adapt your requirements to fit cloud tools. Often, requirements that seem to mandate Jenkins turn out to be legacy practices that could be modernized. But when the requirements are real—unusual integrations, specialized compliance needs, heterogeneous infrastructure—Jenkins remains the tool that can accommodate nearly anything.
High-performance builds with specific needs: CircleCI for teams that want sophisticated caching and parallelism without managing infrastructure, or custom self-hosted runners for teams that need maximum control and have the operational capacity to manage infrastructure properly. The choice depends on whether you’re optimizing for capability or simplicity.
What We’d Avoid
Picking a tool because it’s newest or most hyped. The best CI/CD tool is the one that fits your actual constraints, not the one with the best marketing or the most conference talks. Every tool on this list can ship software reliably; the question is which one fits your team and your requirements.
Over-engineering for hypothetical future needs. Choose based on current requirements, not speculative future scale. You can migrate later if needs genuinely change, and that migration will be easier with clear understanding of actual requirements rather than guessed ones. Many teams invest in complex CI/CD infrastructure for scale they never reach.
Ignoring the migration cost of what you already have. A working Jenkins setup that your team understands has real, tangible value. Migration should provide clear benefits that justify the disruption, cost, and productivity loss during transition—not just “this tool is newer” or “everyone else is using it.”
The goal of CI/CD is shipping software reliably with acceptable overhead. Any of these tools can achieve that goal. Pick based on your actual situation—your team’s skills, your existing infrastructure, your specific requirements—not on feature comparisons that don’t account for your context.