# Alternatives to Jenkins

The infinitely-pluggable CI veteran.

Jenkins ranks #6 of 7 in CI/CD platforms, with an Alt Score of 68. It is licensed under MIT, free from Free and available on Linux, Windows, macOS and Web. 9 of 10 checklist rows are verified against a public source.

Source: https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/jenkins/
Category: CI/CD platforms

## Overview

- **Who it's for**: Development and platform teams that need to automate building, testing, and deploying software, and want full control by self-hosting their CI/CD server rather than using a SaaS pipeline.
- **What you get**: A free, open-source Java-based automation server that runs on Windows, Linux, macOS, and Unix. It supports pipelines as code via a Jenkinsfile, and its plugin ecosystem (hundreds of plugins) integrates with nearly any version control, build, test, and deployment tool. It can distribute jobs across multiple agent machines to parallelize work and speed up builds.
- **How it works**: You install Jenkins as a standalone server (or master/agent cluster), configure jobs or Pipeline projects through its web UI or a Jenkinsfile checked into source control, and plugins extend it to talk to your specific toolchain (source control, build tools, notification systems, cloud providers).

## Profile

- **License**: MIT (verified 2026-07-09)
- **Pricing model**: Free (verified 2026-07-09)
- **Starts at**: Free (verified 2026-07-09)
- **Platforms**: Linux, Windows, macOS, Web
- **Status**: active (verified 2026-07-09)

## Ranked alternatives

| # | App | Alt Score | Licence | Platforms |
|---|-----|-----------|---------|-----------|
| 1 | [CircleCI](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/circleci.md) | 96 | Proprietary | Web |
| 2 | [Semaphore](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/semaphore.md) | 86 | Apache 2.0 (Community Edition); commercial license (Enterprise Edition) | Web, Linux |
| 3 | [Buildkite](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/buildkite.md) | 82 | ? | Web, Linux, macOS, Windows |
| 4 | [TeamCity](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/teamcity.md) | 82 | Proprietary | Windows, Linux, macOS, Web |
| 5 | [Woodpecker CI](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/woodpecker-ci.md) | 82 | Apache-2.0 | Linux, Windows, macOS, Web |
| 6 | [Drone](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/drone.md) | 55 | Apache-2.0 (Community Edition); Drone Non-Commercial License (Enterprise Edition) | Linux, Windows |

Alt Score = Verified coverage (90%) + Visibility (10%). See https://altcatalog.com/how-alt-score-works/

## Feature comparison

Legend: Yes / No / Partial / ? (not verified).

| CI/CD platforms checklist | Jenkins | CircleCI | Semaphore | Buildkite | TeamCity | Woodpecker CI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Free | Freemium | Usage-based | Freemium | Freemium | Free |
| Starts at | Free | Free | $0.003/min (Ubuntu ARM 2vCPU) | Free | €2,399/year | Free |
| License | MIT | Proprietary | Apache 2.0 (Community Edition); commercial license (Enterprise Edition) | ? | Proprietary | Apache-2.0 |
| Platforms | Linux, Windows, macOS, Web | Web | Web, Linux | Web, Linux, macOS, Windows | Windows, Linux, macOS, Web | Linux, Windows, macOS, Web |
| Free tier minutes | ? | Yes | Yes | No | No | No |
| Self-hostable runners | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Pipeline as code | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Matrix builds | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Caching quality | Partial | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Partial |
| Container-native | Partial | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Secrets management | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Marketplace / plugins | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Concurrency limits | No | Partial | Partial | No | Yes | Yes |
| Debugging (SSH into runner) | Partial | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Partial |

## Sources

Sources for Jenkins. Each alternative is sourced on its own page.

- **Pricing model**: Free — <https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jenkinsci/jenkins/master/README.md> (verified 2026-07-09)
  - Note: Free/OSS, self-hosted; no paid tier from the project.
  - Quote: “Jenkins is the leading open-source automation server. Built with Java, it provides over 2,000 plugins to support automating virtually anything”
- **Platforms**: Linux, Windows, macOS, Web — <https://www.jenkins.io/download/> (verified 2026-07-09)
  - Quote: “Jenkins is distributed as WAR files, native packages, installers, and Docker images … Ubuntu/Debian … Red Hat Enterprise Linux and derivatives … Windows … macOS”
- **Status**: active — <https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jenkinsci/jenkins/master/README.md> (verified 2026-07-09)
  - Note: Weekly and LTS release lines.
  - Quote: “Jenkins Regular Release … Jenkins LTS Release … Latest releases”
- **License**: MIT — <https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jenkinsci/jenkins/master/LICENSE.txt> (verified 2026-07-09)
  - Quote: “The MIT License

Copyright (c) 2004-, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Sun Microsystems, Inc., and a number of other of contributors”
- **Starts at**: Free — <https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jenkinsci/jenkins/master/LICENSE.txt> (verified 2026-07-09)
  - Quote: “Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software”
- **Self-hostable runners**: Yes — <https://www.jenkins.io/doc/book/using/using-agents/> (verified 2026-07-09)
  - Quote: “The Jenkins controller administers the Jenkins agents and orchestrates their work, including scheduling jobs on agents and monitoring agents.”
- **Pipeline as code**: Yes — <https://www.jenkins.io/doc/book/pipeline/pipeline-as-code/> (verified 2026-07-09)
  - Quote: “Pipeline as Code describes a set of features that allow Jenkins users to define pipelined job processes with code, stored and versioned in a source repository. … projects must contain a file named Jen”
- **Matrix builds**: Yes — <https://www.jenkins.io/doc/book/pipeline/syntax/> (verified 2026-07-09)
  - Quote: “Stages in Declarative Pipeline may have a matrix section defining a multi-dimensional matrix of name-value combinations to be run in parallel.”
- **Caching quality**: Partial — <https://www.jenkins.io/doc/book/pipeline/docker/> (verified 2026-07-09)
  - Note: Manual cache via Docker volume mounts; no built-in intelligent cache.
  - Quote: “Pipeline supports adding custom arguments that are passed to Docker, allowing users to specify custom Docker Volumes to mount, which can be used for caching data on the agent between Pipeline runs.”
- **Container-native**: Partial — <https://www.jenkins.io/doc/book/pipeline/docker/> (verified 2026-07-09)
  - Note: Docker support via the Docker Pipeline plugin, not built-in natively.
  - Quote: “Pipeline is designed to easily use Docker images as the execution environment for a single Stage or the entire Pipeline”
- **Secrets management**: Yes — <https://www.jenkins.io/doc/book/using/using-credentials/> (verified 2026-07-09)
  - Quote: “Jenkins can store the following types of credentials: Secret text … credentials configured in Jenkins are stored in an encrypted form … and are only handled in Pipeline projects via their credential I”
- **Marketplace / plugins**: Yes — <https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jenkinsci/jenkins/master/README.md> (verified 2026-07-09)
  - Quote: “Built with Java, it provides over 2,000 plugins to support automating virtually anything”
- **Concurrency limits**: No — <https://www.jenkins.io/doc/book/using/using-agents/> (verified 2026-07-09)
  - Note: No software-enforced concurrency limits; bounded by hardware and configured executors.
  - Quote: “The number of executors determines how many concurrent tasks can be run on an agent.”
- **Debugging (SSH into runner)**: Partial — <https://www.jenkins.io/doc/book/using/using-agents/> (verified 2026-07-09)
  - Note: SSH is for agent connection setup; no native SSH-into-running-build debug feature.
  - Quote: “Generating an SSH key pair … you have to execute a command line tool named ssh-keygen on a machine you have access to”

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Ranked by verified data, never by who paid. https://altcatalog.com/trust/