shouldiuse.io

Comparison

Buildkite vs CircleCI

Buildkite and CircleCI both land on Depends.

Buildkite versus CircleCI
CompareBuildkiteCircleCI
VerdictDependsDepends
Best forLarge engineering orgsScaling engineering orgs with complex pipelines
Who it's not forSmall teams on GitHub . Actions is cheaper and simplerSolo devs and side projects . GitHub Actions' free tier is enough
PrivacyNo breaches found; one 2023 symlink vulnerability (CVE-2023-43116) disclosed in the Elastic CI Stack for AWS.⁹Major January 2023 breach with mandatory customer secret rotation; since then routine CVE responses and one researcher-reported CVSS 10.0 MCP-server flaw, patched.
Support qualityNo direct support evidence foundNo support evidence in sources reviewed
Public sentimentReviewers praise speed, flexibility, and scale; complaints center on pricing and the removed free plan.¹Users praise powerful parallel workflows but constantly weigh the bill against GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and free Jenkins, with some migrating to Buildkite.16
Biggest gotchaStarts ~50% above GitHub Enterprise; billing combines active users and agent usage.⁶Jan 2023 incident: all customers urged to rotate secrets stored in CircleCI

Pick Buildkite when

  • Large engineering orgs
  • Heavy monorepo build pipelines
  • Teams wanting agents on their own infra
  • Jenkins refugees

When Buildkite is not a fit

  • Small teams on GitHub . Actions is cheaper and simpler
  • Solo devs wanting zero-maintenance hosted CI
  • Teams with no infra staff to run agents
  • Anyone needing a permanent free tier

Pick CircleCI when

  • Scaling engineering orgs with complex pipelines
  • Heavy parallel test and build workloads
  • Teams with dedicated DevOps owners
  • Startups eligible for their startup program

When CircleCI is not a fit

  • Solo devs and side projects . GitHub Actions' free tier is enough
  • Small teams that can't predict usage-based bills
  • Anyone already all-in on GitLab or GitHub
  • Teams with nobody to own CI config and cost monitoring

Sources

  1. Buildkite Reviews 2026 . G2g2.com
    review
  2. Buildkite Reviews . AWS Marketplaceaws.amazon.com
    review
  3. Buildkite aka the usual CI/CD post . Reddit r/devopsreddit.com
    review
  4. CI/CD Platform Recommendation . Reddit r/devopsreddit.com
    review
  5. Did Buildkite remove their developer plan? . Reddit r/devopsreddit.com
    review
  6. Buildkite pricing vs GitHub Enterprise . Hacker Newsnews.ycombinator.com
    news
  7. Buildkite Pricing pagebuildkite.com
    official
  8. Buildkite raises $28M at $200M valuation . SiliconAnglesiliconangle.com
    news
  9. CVE-2023-43116 . NVDnvd.nist.gov
    security
  10. Buildkite Security pagebuildkite.com
    official
  11. Buildkite agent security docsbuildkite.com
    official
  12. Companies that use Buildkite . TheirStacktheirstack.com
    news
  13. Buildkite . StackSharestackshare.io
    review
  14. Buildkite launches scale-out delivery platformbuildkite.com
    official
  15. Semaphore vs Buildkitesemaphore.io
    review
  16. CircleCI Reviews & Ratings | Gartner Peer Insightsgartner.com
    review