Buildkite vs GrowthBook
Hybrid CI/CD — your compute, their orchestration. Built for scale.
vs. Open-source feature flags + experimentation — Warehouse Native
Pricing tiers
Buildkite
Free (Developer)
$0. Unlimited jobs on self-hosted agents. 10K jobs/mo on Buildkite Hosted.
Free
Buildkite Hosted (usage)
Per-minute on Buildkite-hosted agents. $0.002/min Linux baseline.
$0/mo
Pro
$20/user/mo. SSO. Audit log. Support. Unlimited self-hosted.
$20/mo
Enterprise
Custom. SAML, RBAC, audit SLA, dedicated support.
Custom
GrowthBook
Open Source (Self-Host)
MIT-licensed. Unlimited everything. Community support.
$0 base (usage-based)
Cloud — Starter (Free)
Up to 3 users. Unlimited flags + experiments. Warehouse Native included.
Free
Cloud — Pro
$40/user/month. Up to 50 users. Advanced stats, visual A/B editor, CUPED, sequential testing, bandits.
$40/mo
Cloud — Enterprise
Custom. Unlimited users, SSO/SAML, approval flows, data pipelines, exportable audit logs.
Custom
Self-Host Enterprise
Open Source + Enterprise license. Visual A/B editor, advanced metrics, SSO/SAML, approvals, training.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing free on Buildkite vs oss on GrowthBook.
| Metric | Buildkite | GrowthBook |
|---|---|---|
| No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers. | ||
Features
Buildkite · 17 features
- Agent Queues — Route jobs to specific agents by tag.
- Annotations — Rich Markdown in build UI.
- Artifacts — Upload + download build artifacts.
- Audit Log — Enterprise audit.
- Automatic Cancel — Cancel stale builds on new push.
- Automatic + Manual Retries — Configurable retry semantics.
- Buildkite Hosted Agents — Managed agents (opt-in).
- Dynamic Pipelines — Generate YAML in a command step.
- input Step — Block for user input.
- Parallelism — Parallel step scaling with BUILDKITE_PARALLEL_JOB.
- Pipelines — YAML + optional dynamic upload.
- Plugins — Agent-level lifecycle hooks.
- Secrets (Vault) — Integrate with HashiCorp Vault, SSM.
- Teams + RBAC — Enterprise permissions.
- Test Engine — Flaky test + timing insights.
- trigger Step — Fire another pipeline.
- wait Step — Sync point in pipeline.
GrowthBook · 15 features
- Approval Flows — Require reviewer approval on flag changes. Enterprise.
- Audit Logs — Full change history. Exportable on Enterprise.
- Dimensions & Slicing — Break down experiment results by user dimensions.
- Edge SDK Support — Cloudflare Workers, Lambda@Edge, Fastly, Akamai EdgeWorkers, Netlify Edge.
- Experiments — A/B/n with CUPED variance reduction + sequential testing.
- Feature Flags — Boolean + string + number + JSON flags with targeting.
- Feature Reviews (PR-style) — Draft → review → approve flag changes.
- Guardrail Metrics — Auto-monitor key metrics during experiments.
- Metric Catalog — Define + reuse metrics across experiments.
- Multi-Armed Bandits — Adaptive traffic allocation. Pro+.
- Safe Rollouts — Guarded gradual rollouts with automatic rollback.
- SSO / SAML — Enterprise SSO for cloud + self-host EE.
- Sticky Bucketing — User stays in variant even after eligibility changes.
- Visual A/B Test Editor — No-code DOM editor for web experiments. Pro+.
- Warehouse Native — Connect your warehouse + run experiments against your events data.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Buildkite | GrowthBook |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | bk (Buildkite CLI) | — |
| SDK | — | Edge SDKs (CF Workers / Lambda@Edge / Fastly / Akamai), growthbook-android, growthbook-flutter, growthbook-go, growthbook-java, growthbook-node, growthbook-php, growthbook-python, growthbook-ruby, growthbook-swift, sdk-javascript, sdk-react |
| REST | Buildkite REST API | GrowthBook REST API |
| GRAPHQL | Buildkite GraphQL API | — |
| OTHER | Buildkite Agent, Buildkite Dashboard, Buildkite Plugins, pipeline.yml | Webhooks |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Buildkite and GrowthBook are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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