cicd
Buildkite
Hybrid CI/CD — your compute, their orchestration. Built for scale.
Hybrid CI/CD — Buildkite hosts orchestration, you host the agents (self-hosted) or use Buildkite Hosted. Dynamic pipelines (code-generated YAML), plugin system. Used by Shopify, Airbnb, Lyft.
Pricing
| Tier | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Free (Developer) | Free | $0. Unlimited jobs on self-hosted agents. 10K jobs/mo on Buildkite Hosted. |
| Buildkite Hosted (usage) | $0/mo | Per-minute on Buildkite-hosted agents. $0.002/min Linux baseline. |
| Pro | $20/mo | $20/user/mo. SSO. Audit log. Support. Unlimited self-hosted. |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom. SAML, RBAC, audit SLA, dedicated support. |
Limits
| Tier | Metric | Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| — | agent runtimes | Linux, macOS, Windows, ARM, K8s, Docker Swarm, Nomad | Agent runtimes |
| — | dynamic pipelines | buildkite-agent pipeline upload — generate pipeline at runtime from code | Dynamic pipelines |
| — | hosting model | Hybrid: Buildkite orchestrates, agents run on your infra (or Buildkite Hosted) | Architecture |
| — | monorepo friendly | Well-suited for monorepos — native fan-out + path filtering | Monorepos |
| — | notable users | Shopify, Airbnb, Lyft, Wayfair, Canva — known for large-scale monorepos | Users |
| — | plugins ecosystem | Official + community plugins (Docker, K8s, ECR, Vault, etc.) | Plugins |
| — | scale story | Shopify runs millions of jobs/mo on Buildkite — built for enterprise scale | Scale |
| — | test engine | Buildkite Test Engine — flaky test detection + quarantine (separate product) | Test Engine |
| — | vs jenkins | Hosted UI + hybrid compute vs Jenkins self-hosted; trade-off = UI modernity | Jenkins comparison |
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.
Developer interfaces
| Slug | Name | Kind | Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| cli | bk (Buildkite CLI) | cli | 3.x |
| agent | Buildkite Agent | other | 3.x |
| web-ui | Buildkite Dashboard | other | — |
| graphql | Buildkite GraphQL API | graphql | v1 |
| plugins | Buildkite Plugins | other | — |
| rest-api | Buildkite REST API | rest | v2 |
| yaml-pipeline | pipeline.yml | other | v3 |
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Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Buildkite are plain references to their official pages. Pricing is verified at publication time — reconfirm on the vendor site before buying.