Buildkite
Depends
Confidence: Medium
Buy Buildkite if you're a large engineering org needing fast, scalable CI with agents on your own infrastructure.
Comparison
Buildkite vs Semaphore
Buildkite and Semaphore both land on Depends.
Semaphore
Depends
Confidence: Low
Worth trialing if you need fast hosted CI with agent-friendly usage pricing and have outgrown GitHub Actions.
| Compare | Buildkite | Semaphore |
|---|---|---|
| Verdict | Depends | Depends |
| Best for | Large engineering orgs | Teams outgrowing GitHub Actions |
| Who it's not for | Small teams on GitHub . Actions is cheaper and simpler | Hobby projects . free GitHub Actions already covers you |
| Privacy | No breaches found; one 2023 symlink vulnerability (CVE-2023-43116) disclosed in the Elastic CI Stack for AWS.⁹ | Official page documents encryption; no CVEs found for this product . CVEs in sources apply to the separately named 'Semaphore UI', a different product. |
| Support quality | No direct support evidence found | No support reviews found |
| Public sentiment | Reviewers praise speed, flexibility, and scale; complaints center on pricing and the removed free plan.¹ | Review snippets consistently describe Semaphore CI as fast and reliable, backing a 4.7/5 category rating.16 |
| Biggest gotcha | Starts ~50% above GitHub Enterprise; billing combines active users and agent usage.⁶ | Spendflo lists a free option; confirm whether it's a trial or permanent free tier before budgeting. |
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 Semaphore when
- Teams outgrowing GitHub Actions
- AI-agent-heavy CI workloads
- Speed-sensitive build pipelines
- Mid-size engineering teams
When Semaphore is not a fit
- Hobby projects . free GitHub Actions already covers you
- Solo devs needing only simple builds
- Enterprises demanding audited security reports
- Buyers unwilling to untangle Semaphore CI vs Semaphore UI
Sources
review
- Buildkite Reviews . AWS Marketplaceaws.amazon.comreview
review
- Buildkite pricing vs GitHub Enterprise . Hacker Newsnews.ycombinator.comnews
- Buildkite Pricing pagebuildkite.comofficial
- Buildkite raises $28M at $200M valuation . SiliconAnglesiliconangle.comnews
- CVE-2023-43116 . NVDnvd.nist.govsecurity
- Buildkite Security pagebuildkite.comofficial
- Buildkite agent security docsbuildkite.comofficial
- Companies that use Buildkite . TheirStacktheirstack.comnews
- Buildkite . StackSharestackshare.ioreview
- Buildkite launches scale-out delivery platformbuildkite.comofficial
- Semaphore vs Buildkitesemaphore.ioreview
- Semaphore Reviews . G2g2.comreview
