Best CI/CD · FREE
Best free CI/CD (2026)
6 ci/cd that offer a genuine free plan, ranked by entry price. Every figure links to the public page it was captured from — the vendor's own wherever the vendor publishes the number, otherwise the named public source — with the date we captured it.
Key takeaways
- Cheapest: Buildkite at $0/mo.
- Qualifying: Buildkite, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, GitLab, Harness CI, Semaphore.
- Data current through: 2026-09-02. STALE marks a row with at least one plan we have not re-checked at its source in over 30 days. 1 of 6 rows below is marked.
Comparison
| # | CI/CD | Entry price | Free | HIPAA | SOC 2 | Best for | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Buildkite STALE · 2026-06-14 | $0/mo | Yes | — | Yes | Large engineering orgs needing unlimited parallelism with self-hosted runners | buildkite.com |
| 2 | CircleCI | $0/mo | Yes | — | Yes | Teams needing fine-grained compute control across multiple resource classes | circleci.com |
| 3 | GitHub Actions | $0/mo | Yes | — | Yes | Teams already on GitHub who want zero-friction CI/CD | github.com |
| 4 | GitLab | $0/mo | Yes | — | Yes | Teams wanting an all-in-one SCM + CI/CD + security platform | about.gitlab.com |
| 5 | Harness CI | $0/mo | Yes | — | Yes | Large enterprises wanting a modular, all-in-one DevOps platform (CI + CD + security) | harness.io |
| 6 | Semaphore | $0/mo | Yes | — | Yes | Speed-sensitive teams where build latency is a bottleneck | semaphore.io |