Jenkins powers a huge portion of enterprise CI/CD. It’s been around since 2011, has thousands of plugins, and runs in environments ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies.
It also feels increasingly dated. The UI is clunky. Configuration is verbose. Plugin compatibility is a constant headache. Every time a new tool launches with a sleek interface and YAML-based configuration, the question resurfaces: is Jenkins still worth using?
The honest answer: it depends on your situation.
Where Jenkins Still Makes Sense
Jenkins has real advantages that newer tools don’t match, and these advantages matter for specific organizational contexts.
Flexibility. Jenkins can do almost anything you can imagine automating. Complex build pipelines with unusual sequencing, custom integrations with legacy systems, deployment targets that cloud platforms have never heard of—if you can script it, Jenkins can run it. The platform started as a generic automation server, not specifically a CI/CD tool, and that heritage gives it remarkable flexibility. Cloud-native alternatives like GitHub Actions and GitLab CI have opinions about how things should work, and those opinions may not match your needs. Jenkins has fewer opinions, which means more configuration but also more capability.
Self-hosted control. For organizations with strict security requirements—regulated industries, government contractors, companies handling sensitive data—running CI/CD on your own infrastructure isn’t optional. Jenkins gives you complete control over where builds run, what network traffic occurs, and what data leaves your environment. You can air-gap it entirely if needed. Cloud-hosted CI/CD, even with security certifications, may not satisfy auditors or security requirements that mandate on-premises processing.
Existing investment. If you have hundreds of Jenkins pipelines that work reliably, a team that understands the platform deeply, and processes built around its capabilities, migration has real costs that shouldn’t be dismissed. The productivity loss during transition, the risk of introducing bugs in rebuilt pipelines, the institutional knowledge that has to be reconstructed—these aren’t free. The new tool needs to be significantly better, in ways that matter for your organization, to justify the disruption.
Plugin ecosystem. Despite the maintenance headaches that plugins create, the Jenkins plugin ecosystem covers integrations that cloud tools don’t support. Legacy systems that no one else needs to integrate with, niche tools that your industry uses, unusual deployment targets that aren’t on any cloud provider’s priority list—there’s often a Jenkins plugin that already works. And if there isn’t, Jenkins’s extensibility means you can build what you need.
Where Jenkins Shows Its Age
Jenkins’s weaknesses are also real, and they become more apparent as modern alternatives mature.
Configuration complexity. Jenkinsfiles are verbose compared to GitHub Actions workflows or GitLab CI configurations. What takes 10 lines in a modern tool can easily take 50 lines in Jenkins, with more opportunities for subtle errors. The Groovy syntax that powers Jenkinsfiles is powerful—it’s a full programming language—but that power comes with a steep learning curve. Developers who just want to set up a basic build-test-deploy pipeline shouldn’t need to learn a new programming language, but Jenkins often requires exactly that for anything beyond the simplest cases.
Maintenance burden. Jenkins requires ongoing care that cloud-native tools push to the vendor. Upgrades need planning because plugin compatibility is never guaranteed. Security patches need prompt attention because Jenkins is a high-value target for attackers. Infrastructure management—servers, storage, networking, backups—falls entirely on your team. This isn’t occasional work; it’s continuous operational responsibility that consumes time and attention that could go toward building products.
UI and developer experience. The Jenkins interface feels like 2011 enterprise software because that’s essentially what it is. Finding logs requires knowing where to look. Understanding build failures means navigating through multiple screens. The overall experience takes more effort than modern alternatives that were designed with developer experience as a priority. For teams that interact with CI/CD daily, this friction compounds into meaningful productivity loss.
Scaling complexity. Running Jenkins at scale requires significant operational investment. Distributed agents need to be provisioned, managed, and monitored. Resource allocation needs to balance build parallelism against infrastructure costs. High availability requires additional infrastructure and expertise. Cloud-native tools handle this scaling automatically; with Jenkins, it’s your problem to solve.
The Migration Question
If you’re considering migrating away from Jenkins, be realistic about what you’re getting into. Migration is rarely as straightforward as vendor documentation suggests.
Migrating pipelines isn’t just syntax translation. Jenkins pipelines often contain implicit assumptions that aren’t visible in the configuration files—environment variables that are set somewhere else, plugins that provide capabilities you didn’t realize you depended on, timing dependencies between jobs that nobody documented. Custom plugins may not have equivalents on the new platform. Workarounds that evolved over years to handle specific edge cases need to be understood before they can be recreated. Moving to a new tool means understanding all of this accumulated complexity and deciding how to handle each piece.
Cloud tools have constraints. GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and CircleCI are opinionated about how CI/CD should work. They work great when your needs fit their model—and they were designed to fit common needs well. But they’re frustrating when you need something they don’t support natively. Jenkins’s lack of opinions becomes valuable when your requirements don’t match what the opinionated tools expect. Before migrating, verify that the new tool can actually handle your specific workflows, not just the common patterns shown in tutorials.
The long tail takes longer than you expect. Most pipelines migrate relatively smoothly—the standard build-test-deploy workflows translate without major issues. But the last 20% of pipelines, the ones with unusual requirements, legacy integrations, or complex conditional logic, will take disproportionate effort. Plan for this. Organizations that declare migration complete when the main pipelines are working often end up maintaining two systems indefinitely.
When to Stay
Keep Jenkins if your current situation satisfies most of these criteria:
- Your pipelines work reliably and your team knows the system. A working CI/CD system that your team understands deeply has genuine value that’s easy to underestimate. The institutional knowledge of how to debug problems, work around limitations, and extend capabilities is hard-won and doesn’t transfer automatically to a new platform.
- You have extensive custom plugins or integrations. If your Jenkins installation includes custom plugins that your organization built, or integrations with internal systems that don’t have equivalents elsewhere, migration means rebuilding all of that capability. Evaluate whether the new platform can even support what you need.
- Self-hosted is a hard requirement. If regulatory, security, or compliance requirements mandate that CI/CD runs on infrastructure you control, Jenkins remains one of the best options. Cloud-hosted alternatives may not satisfy your auditors regardless of their security certifications.
- The maintenance burden is manageable with your current team. If you have people who can handle Jenkins maintenance without it becoming a significant distraction from other work, the operational cost may be acceptable. The question is whether that maintenance effort could be better spent elsewhere.
- Migration costs don’t justify the benefits. Every migration has costs—direct costs of the work, indirect costs of disruption, risk costs of introducing bugs. If the benefits of a new platform don’t clearly outweigh these costs for your situation, staying put is the right choice.
When to Move
Consider migrating away from Jenkins if:
- You’re starting new projects that don’t need existing Jenkins infrastructure. New projects are natural opportunities to evaluate alternatives without the burden of migration. If a new project would benefit from tighter GitHub integration or simpler configuration, there’s no reason it needs to use Jenkins just because other projects do.
- Maintenance burden is consuming significant team time. If Jenkins maintenance is a meaningful part of someone’s job—constant plugin updates, troubleshooting infrastructure issues, handling security patches—that’s time that could go toward building products. Cloud-hosted alternatives shift this burden to vendors.
- You’re already using GitHub or GitLab and want tighter integration. If your code lives in GitHub or GitLab, the native CI/CD options provide integration benefits that Jenkins can’t match. Pull request workflows, branch protections, and deployment tracking work seamlessly when everything is in one platform.
- Developer experience complaints are affecting productivity. If developers find Jenkins frustrating to use, that friction has real costs. Modern alternatives were designed with developer experience as a priority, and teams that interact with CI/CD frequently may see meaningful productivity gains from switching.
- You need features that are bolted-on in Jenkins. Native container builds, built-in caching, automatic parallelization—these features exist in Jenkins via plugins and configuration, but they’re first-class citizens in modern alternatives. If these capabilities are important to you, platforms designed around them may serve you better.
The Hybrid Path
Many organizations take a middle approach: keep Jenkins for existing pipelines that work well, use newer tools for new projects that would benefit from them. This pragmatic strategy avoids forced migration of working systems while preventing further investment in a platform you’re moving away from. Over time, as old projects retire or get rewritten, the Jenkins footprint naturally shrinks without requiring a dedicated migration effort.
The hybrid approach works well when it’s intentional. Decide which new work goes where based on clear criteria—perhaps new projects use GitHub Actions if they’re in GitHub, while projects with unusual requirements that Jenkins handles well stay on Jenkins. Document these criteria so the decision is consistent rather than ad-hoc.
The risk is running two systems indefinitely without a clear direction. If the hybrid state persists, you’re paying the operational costs of both platforms—maintaining Jenkins infrastructure while also managing cloud CI/CD configurations. Teams need to know both systems. Integrations may need to work with either. Without a long-term plan, hybrid can become a permanent state that’s worse than fully committing to either option.
Bottom Line
Jenkins isn’t dead, and for many organizations it’s still the right choice. The platform powers a huge portion of enterprise CI/CD for good reasons: flexibility that newer tools can’t match, self-hosted control that some organizations require, and an ecosystem that covers integrations no one else supports.
But Jenkins is also not the obvious default it once was. Modern alternatives offer better developer experience, simpler configuration, and managed operations that eliminate maintenance burden. For many use cases, especially teams using GitHub or GitLab who don’t need Jenkins’s flexibility, the newer tools are simply better choices.
The decision should be based on your specific situation—existing investment, team skills, requirements, security constraints, and maintenance capacity—not on what’s newest or most talked about. The best CI/CD tool is the one that reliably ships your software with acceptable maintenance overhead. Sometimes that’s still Jenkins. Often, increasingly, it’s something else. The honest answer depends on context that only you can evaluate.