Best CI/CD · alternatives
Best GitHub Actions alternatives (2026)
6 alternatives to GitHub Actions in ci/cd, ranked by entry price. GitHub Actions starts at $0/mo. Every figure links to the vendor's own page and the date we captured it.
Key takeaways
- Free alternatives: Buildkite, CircleCI, GitLab, Harness CI, Semaphore.
- Closest by price: Buildkite ($0/mo), CircleCI ($0/mo), GitLab ($0/mo).
GitHub Actions alternatives compared
| # | Alternative | Entry price | Free | HIPAA | Best for | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Buildkite | $0/mo | Yes | — | Large engineering orgs needing unlimited parallelism with self-hosted runners | buildkite.com |
| 2 | CircleCI | $0/mo | Yes | — | Teams needing fine-grained compute control across multiple resource classes | circleci.com |
| 3 | GitLab | $0/mo | Yes | — | Teams wanting an all-in-one SCM + CI/CD + security platform | about.gitlab.com |
| 4 | Harness CI | $0/mo | Yes | — | Large enterprises wanting a modular, all-in-one DevOps platform (CI + CD + security) | harness.io |
| 5 | Semaphore | $0/mo | Yes | — | Speed-sensitive teams where build latency is a bottleneck | semaphore.io |
| 6 | Travis CI | $15/mo | No | — | Teams with long-standing open-source projects historically on travis-ci.org | travis-ci.com |
Data current through 2026-06-14. Compare any two directly on the CI/CD index.