Jenkins vs GitHub Actions with compiler.dev runners

Jenkins is free, open source and endlessly configurable, and it runs on servers you maintain. GitHub Actions is a hosted service with a per-minute price and almost no maintenance. The honest comparison is not license cost against minute cost. It is the cost of the people and machines that keep Jenkins healthy against the minutes you would buy. This page walks through that tradeoff, says where Jenkins is the better choice, and shows a migration.

What Jenkins is and what it costs

Jenkins describes itself as "the leading open source automation server" on jenkins.io (checked October 2026). It is a Java application that works as a CI server or a delivery hub and distributes work across many machines. The site lists more than 2,300 community plugins.

There is no license fee and no per-minute fee. What you pay for instead:

• Compute. A controller plus agents, whether EC2, Kubernetes pods or bare metal. Idle agents cost money; undersized ones create queues.
• Maintenance. Jenkins core and plugin upgrades, security advisories, plugin compatibility, backups of the controller, disk growth.
• People. Someone owns it. In many teams that is part of a platform engineer's job, and it tends to be the one person who understands the Groovy shared libraries.

None of this is a reason to avoid Jenkins. It is a reason to price it with those lines included. Our self-hosted vs GitHub-hosted guide covers the same tradeoff for runners.

Side by side

Where Jenkins is genuinely better

• Zero license cost and no vendor. For a team with spare capacity and skills, the marginal cost of one more job is nearly nothing.
• Plugin flexibility. If a niche system (a mainframe, a hardware lab, a legacy artifact store) has a Jenkins plugin, nothing else will have more integrations.
• Persistent workspaces. Agents can keep checkouts and build outputs between runs, which can make incremental builds of huge repos fast. Fresh-VM runners trade that for cleanliness.
• On-premise and air-gapped. Jenkins runs without any internet access. Actions needs GitHub, and compiler.dev needs to reach its control plane.
• Arbitrary pipeline logic. Scripted pipelines in Groovy can express things YAML cannot.

If your CI touches hardware, offline networks or oddly shaped legacy tooling, Jenkins is often the right answer.

The case for GitHub Actions on faster runners

Most teams on Jenkins in 2026 are carrying history rather than requirements. Controllers get patched late, plugins go unmaintained and pipelines live in a shared library only one person can read. Actions removes the server, ties results to pull requests natively, and a large marketplace replaces plugins.

The worry with hosted CI is speed and price. compiler.dev runs standard workflows on 8 vCPU / 16 GB machines, a fresh VM per job, billed at $0.012 per minute with no idle cost. In our benchmarks, full CI runs were a median 1.5× faster across 18 measured stacks (15 faster, 2 the same, 1 slower) than GitHub-hosted runners, for example Angular + Spring Boot (Gradle) + Postgres from 6m57s to 2m18s. We did not compare against Jenkins; a well-tuned Jenkins fleet with warm workspaces can be very fast.

A useful sanity check: add up the monthly cost of your Jenkins machines and the engineer hours spent on it, then compare with your minutes times the rate on the pricing page. The cost calculator helps with the second half. If you also want to cut waiting time, read speed up GitHub Actions.

Migration sketch

A declarative Jenkinsfile:

pipeline {
  agent { label 'linux' }
  options { timeout(time: 20, unit: 'MINUTES') }
  stages {
    stage('Build') {
      steps { sh './gradlew assemble' }
    }
    stage('Test') {
      steps { sh './gradlew test' }
      post { always { junit 'build/test-results/**/*.xml' } }
    }
    stage('Deploy') {
      when { branch 'main' }
      steps { withCredentials([string(credentialsId: 'deploy-token', variable: 'TOKEN')]) {
        sh './deploy.sh'
      } }
    }
  }
}

The GitHub Actions equivalent:

name: ci
on:
  pull_request:
  push:
    branches: [main]
jobs:
  build-test:
    runs-on: [self-hosted, Linux, compiler-ci]
    timeout-minutes: 20
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: actions/setup-java@v4
        with:
          distribution: temurin
          java-version: 21
          cache: gradle
      - run: ./gradlew assemble
      - run: ./gradlew test
      - uses: actions/upload-artifact@v4
        if: always()
        with:
          name: test-results
          path: build/test-results
  deploy:
    needs: build-test
    if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/main' && github.event_name == 'push'
    runs-on: [self-hosted, Linux, compiler-ci]
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: ./deploy.sh
        env:
          TOKEN: ${{ secrets.DEPLOY_TOKEN }}

Migration approach for a Jenkins estate:

1. Inventory jobs. Many are dead; delete them first.
2. Migrate the most active pipeline first and keep Jenkins running alongside.
3. Replace shared libraries with composite actions or reusable workflows.
4. Move credentials from the Jenkins store to GitHub secrets, using OIDC for cloud access where possible, see OIDC to AWS.
5. Replace junit publishing with a test reporter action and post blocks with if: always().
6. Decommission the controller only after agents have been idle for a full release cycle.

GitHub's Actions Importer can draft conversions from Jenkins; review the output carefully. Try the runner side with the GitHub App.

FAQ

Is Jenkins really free?

The software is free and open source. The servers, upgrades, security work and the people running it are not.

Is Jenkins faster than GitHub Actions?

It can be, if you tune agents and keep warm workspaces. It can also be slower if agents are small or queued. Speed follows hardware and caching, not the product.

Should I migrate from Jenkins to GitHub Actions?

If your code is on GitHub and nothing ties you to on-premise or hardware, usually yes, one pipeline at a time. If you need offline builds or special hardware, stay.

What replaces Jenkins plugins in Actions?

Marketplace actions or a shell step calling the tool's CLI. Check the actions you need exist before committing to the move.