What Is Buildkite? Features, Pricing & Alternatives

Overview

Buildkite is a CI/CD platform with a hybrid architecture: Buildkite runs the orchestration, web interface and APIs as a service, while builds execute on Buildkite agents that customers run on their own infrastructure, or on Buildkite-hosted agents. This keeps source code and secrets inside the customer’s network while avoiding the maintenance of a CI server, and it scales to very large numbers of parallel agents. Pipelines can be generated dynamically at runtime, which large monorepo users rely on to run only the steps affected by a change.^[13] Buildkite also sells test analytics measured in test executions. Pricing is per active user: the Free plan supports up to five users and ten concurrent jobs, the Pro plan costs US$30 per active user per month with up to 250 connected agents (ten included, then US$3.50 per agent per month), and Enterprise is custom with a 30-user minimum.^[13] The model suits engineering organisations with large, fast-growing build fleets. Teams need to operate their own agent infrastructure unless they pay for hosted agents.

What Buildkite does

SaaS control plane with self-hosted agents
Hosted agents option
Dynamic pipelines generated at runtime
Test analytics
Connection to on-premises GitHub Enterprise
30-day all-access trial

Buildkite pricing

Free: US$0, up to 5 active users, up to 10 concurrent jobs. Pro: US$30 per active user per month, up to 50 users, up to 250 agents (10 included, then US$3.50 per agent per month), artifact storage 250 GB per month then US$0.05 per GB-month. Enterprise: custom, 30-user minimum. 30-day all-access trial.