Bitbucket Pipelines vs GitHub Actions with compiler.dev runners

Bitbucket Pipelines is the CI built into Atlassian's Bitbucket Cloud. Its seat price is low, and its Jira and Atlassian integration is the real reason people use it. If your repositories are on Bitbucket, stay with Pipelines unless you have a reason to move. If they are on GitHub, you are choosing Actions, and the lever for speed is the runner. This page lays out the numbers and the tradeoffs.

How Bitbucket pricing works

Bitbucket charges per user, with a pool of build minutes shared across the workspace. From the Bitbucket pricing page (checked October 2026):

• Free: $0 for up to 5 users, with 50 build minutes a month.
• Standard: $3.65 per user per month.
• Premium: $8 per user per month.
• Extra minutes: $10 per month buys 1,000 more minutes.

The page does not state the included minutes for Standard and Premium, so check your plan page for that number. Minutes are consumed according to runner size: a 5-minute step on a 2x runner counts as 10 build minutes. Build minutes are shared across all users in a workspace.

The 1,000 minutes for $10 works out to $0.01 per build minute at the 1x size, our arithmetic. A cheap seat price and a small free pool means light CI users pay little, while heavy users buy minutes in blocks.

Side by side

Not all of this is like for like. The 1x runner on Pipelines is a smaller machine than an 8 vCPU box, so per-minute price alone misleads: a build that takes 10 minutes on a small runner may take 3 on a large one.

Where Bitbucket Pipelines is genuinely better

• Jira and Atlassian tie-in. Branches, builds and deployments link to Jira issues automatically, and deployment tracking feeds Jira releases. Actions can post to Jira through apps, but it is not native.
• Seat price. At $3.65 per user, a large team with moderate CI is cheap.
• Simplicity. One YAML file, pipes for common tasks, steps on a clean Docker container. For a small team it is quick to start.
• Deployment environments. Built-in environments with promotion and deployment history in the UI.

If your planning, documentation and CI all run through Atlassian, the integration value is real, and a runner provider cannot reproduce it.

The case for GitHub Actions on faster runners

Actions has far more reusable building blocks, a larger community and answers for nearly every tool. Its pull request checks, merge queue and CODEOWNERS enforcement are mature. The usual drawback, slow default runners, is fixable: compiler.dev runs the same workflows on 8 vCPU / 16 GB Linux machines for $0.012 per minute, against GitHub's 8-core larger runner at $0.022.

From our benchmarks against GitHub-hosted runners: React + Rust (Axum) + Postgres 2m37s to 1m45s, Next.js + Supabase with Playwright 4m03s to 2m48s. These are GitHub-hosted comparisons; we did not measure Bitbucket Pipelines.

Moving repositories from Bitbucket to GitHub is a project of its own, so only do it if you want other benefits of GitHub as well. Read GitHub Actions pricing to see what you would pay, and the pricing page for runner rates.

Migration sketch

A Bitbucket pipeline:

image: node:20

definitions:
  caches:
    npm: ~/.npm

pipelines:
  pull-requests:
    '**':
      - step:
          name: Test
          size: 2x
          caches: [npm]
          script:
            - npm ci
            - npm test
  branches:
    main:
      - step:
          name: Deploy
          deployment: production
          script:
            - ./deploy.sh

The GitHub Actions equivalent:

name: ci
on:
  pull_request:
  push:
    branches: [main]
jobs:
  test:
    if: github.event_name == 'pull_request'
    runs-on: [self-hosted, Linux, compiler-ci]
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version: 20
          cache: npm
      - run: npm ci
      - run: npm test
  deploy:
    if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/main' && github.event_name == 'push'
    runs-on: [self-hosted, Linux, compiler-ci]
    environment: production
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: ./deploy.sh

Points to handle:

1. size: 2x becomes the choice of runner; compiler.dev offers 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 vCPU, see the runner size picker.
2. Pipes become marketplace actions or plain script steps.
3. Repository and deployment variables become GitHub secrets and environment secrets.
4. Jira links: install Atlassian's GitHub integration so issue keys in branches and commits still connect.

The GitHub App is the starting point once your code is on GitHub.

FAQ

Is Bitbucket Pipelines free?

The Free plan has 50 build minutes a month for up to 5 users (checked October 2026). Extra minutes are sold in blocks of 1,000 for $10 a month.

Is Bitbucket Pipelines cheaper than GitHub Actions?

Seat price is lower, and extra minutes are about $0.01 each at the standard size. GitHub's standard Linux runner is $0.006 per minute. The comparison depends on machine size, included minutes and team size, so run your numbers in the cost calculator.

Can I keep Jira if I move to GitHub Actions?

Yes. Jira has a GitHub integration that links branches, commits and pull requests to issues.

Why does a 2x step cost twice as much?

Build minutes scale with runner size, so a step on a larger runner uses more of the pool per minute of wall time.