Independent · sourced · Updated June 2026
Best CI/CD (2026)
The cheapest ci/cd is Buildkite at $0/mo. 6 offer a free tier (Buildkite, CircleCI, GitHub Actions). This page compares 7 options on entry price, free tier, HIPAA/SOC 2 and best-for — every figure linked to its source, updated June 2026.
7 options compared on price, free tier, compliance and fit — ranked cheapest-first. Every figure links to the vendor's own page and the date we captured it; quote-only tiers show “—”, never a guess.
Key takeaways
- Cheapest: Buildkite at $0/mo (Personal).
- Typical paid price: from $4/mo, median $15/mo, up to $30/mo — across 5 with published pricing.
- Free tier: Buildkite, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, GitLab, Harness CI, Semaphore.
- Tracked: 7 vendors, data current through 2026-06-15.
Comparison
| # | CI/CD | Entry price | Free | HIPAA | SOC 2 | Best for | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Buildkite | $0/mo Personal | Yes | — | Yes | Large engineering orgs needing unlimited parallelism with self-hosted runners | buildkite.com |
| 2 | CircleCI | $0/mo Free | Yes | — | Yes | Teams needing fine-grained compute control across multiple resource classes | circleci.com |
| 3 | GitHub Actions | $0/mo Free | Yes | — | Yes | Teams already on GitHub who want zero-friction CI/CD | github.com |
| 4 | GitLab | $0/mo Free | Yes | — | Yes | Teams wanting an all-in-one SCM + CI/CD + security platform | about.gitlab.com |
| 5 | Harness CI | $0/mo Free | Yes | — | Yes | Large enterprises wanting a modular, all-in-one DevOps platform (CI + CD + security) | harness.io |
| 6 | Semaphore | $0/mo Pay-as-you-go | Yes | — | Yes | Speed-sensitive teams where build latency is a bottleneck | semaphore.io |
| 7 | Travis CI | $15/mo Usage Based | No | — | — | Teams with long-standing open-source projects historically on travis-ci.org | travis-ci.com |
Prices are the lowest published self-serve monthly rate as captured on the linked source. Annual-billing and usage details are on each vendor's record in our open dataset.
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Frequently asked questions
What is the cheapest ci/cd?
Buildkite has the lowest published entry price at $0/mo (Personal), as of 2026-06-15.
How much does ci/cd cost per month?
Across the 5 ci/cd with published paid pricing, the median starting price is $15/mo, ranging from $4/mo to $30/mo, as of 2026-06-15. 6 also offer a free tier.
Which ci/cd have a free plan?
Buildkite, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, GitLab, Harness CI, Semaphore offer a free tier.
More software comparisons
How we compiled this
Published self-serve USD pricing was collected directly from each vendor's official pricing page on 2026-06-14 via live WebFetch. Every USD figure appears on the fetched page. Quote-only and contact-sales tiers are recorded with monthlyUsd = null — no figures were guessed. Telephony fields (minutesIncluded, callsIncluded, overagePerMin, overagePerCall) are null on every plan because this is a non-telephony vertical. For GitHub Actions, compute per-minute rates were cross-checked against the official billing documentation. Travis CI pricing was confirmed from the /pricing/ path after /plans/ returned 404. Semaphore redirected from semaphoreci.com to semaphore.io; pricing fetched from the canonical domain. Harness CI has no publicly listed prices and is included with null plans. Drone.io returned 404 and was excluded. corroboration URLs are second independent sources confirming figures where available.
Last verified 2026-06-15. We re-check published prices and compliance on a recurring cadence and update this page when they change.
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