What Is Jenkins? CI/CD Tool Overview & Pricing

Overview

Jenkins is a free, open-source automation server that describes itself as the leading open-source automation server, providing hundreds of plugins to support building, deploying and automating any project.^[5] It is self-hosted: an organisation installs a controller and connects agents on its own machines, virtual machines or Kubernetes clusters, and defines jobs and pipelines through the web interface or as code. Its longevity and plugin ecosystem mean that Jenkins can integrate with almost any source-control system, build tool, test framework or deployment target, including legacy systems that newer SaaS services do not support. The project has recently redesigned its header and user interface.^[5] Jenkins has no licence fee, but the total cost of ownership includes servers, maintenance, plugin upgrades and security patching, all of which fall on the user. Plugin compatibility problems, a dated configuration model and the need for dedicated administrators are the most commonly documented drawbacks, and many organisations have migrated to managed CI services for that reason.