Buildkite is a CI/CD platform that runs builds on a team's own agents or on hosted machines from a SaaS control plane, sold per active user plus usage.
Buildkite runs the builds and tests behind every code change while the build machines stay wherever a team decides. Buildkite Pty Ltd, the Melbourne company Keith Pitt and Lachlan Donald founded in 2013, makes and runs it. Pipelines live in a pipeline.yml file beside the code and are orchestrated from a SaaS control plane. The jobs run on agents: the team's own machines, Buildkite's hosted fleet, or a mix of both. Buildkite Pipelines is the core, with dynamic pipelines, build matrices and build schedules. A block step pauses a build until a team member unblocks it, which is how deploys get a human check. Test Engine uses historical test data to detect unreliable tests, and its alarm and recover rules act on them. Package Registries keeps packages close to the builds that use them, a capability that arrived with the Packagecloud acquisition in 2023. Mobile Delivery Cloud is a preconfigured delivery environment that takes an app from the IDE to the app store. The platform suits engineering teams moving off Jenkins and teams whose large monorepos need builds spread across many machines. Its hybrid design fits organizations that keep models and data in their own environment, because Buildkite has no access to what runs on self-hosted agents. Mobile teams rely on the hosted macOS agents. Codebases with long, flaky test suites get the most from Test Engine. A typical change opens a pull request on GitHub, which starts a build and receives a commit status when it finishes. The test suite fans out across parallel jobs, and failures flow into Test Engine for triage. Jobs that touch the cloud request short-lived AWS, GCP or Azure credentials through OIDC instead of holding stored keys, while secrets stay redacted in the logs. Agents can run on Kubernetes through the Agent Stack for Kubernetes. Platform teams keep many pipelines consistent with pipeline templates, so one change to a template reaches every pipeline built on it.
Pricing
View plans-
Free
Free
- For solo developers and small teams, up to 5 users
- Up to 10 concurrent jobs
- Up to 2,000 Linux vCPU minutes of hosted agents per month
- Up to 250k test executions per month
- Dynamic pipelines
- 30-day build retention and 30-day artifact retention
- 50GB artifact storage and 250GB artifact downloads per month
- Community support
- Starts with the 30-day all-access trial, no credit card required
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Pro
$30 per month
Billed per active user per month
- Up to 50 users
- Up to 250 concurrent self-hosted agents, 10 included, then $3.50 per agent a month
- 4,000 Linux vCPU minutes of hosted agents per month included
- macOS hosted agents, larger machine sizes and higher concurrency
- 1M test executions per month
- 90-day build retention and 30-day artifact retention
- 250GB artifact storage a month, then $0.05 per GB-month
- 2.5TB artifact downloads a month, then $0.10 per GB
- Priority email support
- 30-day all-access trial, no credit card required
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Enterprise
Custom pricing
- Price on request; unlimited users with a 30 user minimum and volume discounts
- Custom usage and rate limits
- Pipeline templates
- Buildkite hosted agents with remote Docker builders
- ARM64 and larger hosted machine shapes on request
- Custom build history, artifact retention, storage and downloads
- Advanced governance and control, with EventBridge and SIEM integration
- Enterprise support with SLA credits, priority response times and Slack Connect
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Hosted agents usage
Custom pricing
- $0.004 per Linux vCPU minute, metered to the second with no minimums and no rounding
- Linux Small 2 vCPU $0.008, Medium 4 vCPU $0.016, Large 8 vCPU $0.032 per minute
- $0.02 per Mac vCPU minute
- Mac M4 Medium 6 vCPU $0.12, M4 Large 12 vCPU $0.24 per minute
- Charged on top of plan seats; macOS agents need Pro or Enterprise
Features
- Included: Pipeline as code in the repository
- Included: Pipeline triggers on push and pull request
- Included: Parallel jobs and matrix builds
- Included: Dependency caching between pipeline runs
- Included: Self-hosted runners
- Included: Hosted macOS, Windows and Linux runners
- Included: Scheduled pipelines
- Included: Manual approval gates before deploy
- Not included: Protected deployment environments
- Included: Masked secrets for pipeline jobs
- Included: OIDC cloud credentials for jobs
- Included: Reusable pipeline templates
- Included: Test reports with flaky test detection
- Included: Artifact passing between jobs
- Included: Pipeline duration and success analytics
- Not included: Merge queue
- Included: Free monthly build minutes
- Not included: Self-managed CI server edition
Additional Features
- Buildkite Pipelines
- Dynamic pipelines
- pipeline.yml steps stored in the repository
- Build matrix jobs from one step template
- Block steps that wait for a team member to unblock
- Build schedules
- Pipeline triggers API for GitHub, Linear and generic webhooks
- Self-hosted agents on Linux, macOS, Windows and Docker
Best for
- Engineering teams replacing a Jenkins setup
- Teams building large monorepos
- Test-heavy codebases troubled by flaky tests
- Organizations that keep build machines, models and data on their own infrastructure
- Mobile teams that need hosted macOS build agents
- AI and ML teams running training pipelines on self-hosted agents
- Platform teams standardizing many pipelines from one template
- Solo developers and small teams of up to 5 users
- Teams content with a SaaS control plane, since only the agents are self-hosted
Use cases
- Replacing Jenkins with pipelines defined in the repository
- Splitting a long test suite across parallel jobs
- Building GitHub pull requests and posting commit statuses back
- Detecting unreliable tests from historical test data
- Holding a production deploy until a team member unblocks it
- Running builds on a schedule
- Running jobs on self-hosted agents inside a private network
- Building iOS apps on hosted macOS agents
- Giving jobs short-lived AWS, GCP or Azure credentials through OIDC
- Rolling one pipeline change out to every pipeline that uses a template
- Hosting packages next to the pipelines that build them
- Tracking build speed and queue waits per pipeline
- Running AI and ML training and evaluation workflows
Screenshots & Videos
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