Buildkite Pros and Cons

Buildkite has a fantastic plugin architecture that lets me, my team, and even newbies-to-the-tool write their own plugins. Unlike Jenkins, these plugins don't break anything or interfere with the system in any way. Their support team is also amazing, super responsive and knowledgeable. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

This is a difficult question, because Buildkite is such a great product, it is hard to find anything to dislike. Their slack integration is a generation behind on the slack API, which makes it a bit tougher to admin at scale, but that is a very minor thing. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The platform and API documentation are stellar; kudos to the GraphQL explorer as well!

Utilizing clusters and having a webhook and notification service built into the platform has eased some previous pain we've experienced.

The web UI and UX are very intuitive, and pairing them with the amazing docs makes for a pleasant product introduction. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Mostly a personal gripe; creating a YAML pipeline doesn't feel great when done through the API.

More specifically, the configuration field in the payload is very clunky and difficult to interface with as a human.

(I know the intention is for it to be done programmatically as an API, but it felt worth calling out)

Another nit-picky thing I've noticed is that certain values that go into a build's meta_data are casted in the response/event notification payloads. (int -> string) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Buildkite is a pleasure for our developers to use compared to other solutions we've tried. It is pluggable and customizable for the organization's needs without being cumbersome to customize. I love that we can use Vault to intuitively and securely store secrets for individual pipelines or shared secrets. We can encapsulate shared pipeline logic by writing simple plugins. Operating the runners is a breeze. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Buildkite's documentation and tooling for plugins made it easy to fall into the trap of writing big plugins that are all bash code which is very difficult to test, so be mindful when writing plugins to only use bash as a minimal wrapper.

Their pipeline search functionality is not the greatest.

Onboarding pipelines is not the easiest, especially if you want the pipeline to be defined from code in the repo itself.

But these are small prices to pay for how great Buildkite is. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Very flexible, gives engineers flexibility and ease of use. We can integrate with our existing tools fairly easily due to this flexibility. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It'd be great to see more APIs for streamlining certain things. Such as creating a suite entry through an API rather than having to do it manually. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We've used several different CI systems in the past four years, and Buildkite has been the best. Their configuration is highly flexible and the "bring your own infrastructure" aspect allows us to prioritize performance where it matters for us. We've gotten what used to be 12-18 minute builds running in under five minutes with layer caching and parallelization available in Buildkite. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The minorest of quibbles: I've found dynamic pipelines (where the steps in the pipeline are built at pipeline start) to be difficult to write.

We sometimes see errors that appear to be Docker Hub not responding that don't seem easily fixable with retries (< 1% of builds). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Over the years, I've used Travis, Circle-CI, Jenkins, and lots of in-house tools. For me, Buildkite manages the right parts - the controller and dashboard - while giving me the proper control over the runtime environment. Compared to other managed CIs, bringing our own agents lets us customize their resources, secure access, and much more -- and also results in a lower bill since they don't charge us a huge markup over raw cloud prices. Better control, more power, and a great price. Customer support and product improvement have also always been outstanding. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There's not much to dislike. AWS itself is pretty complicated (we use the Elastic CI CloudFormation stack), but that is the cost of doing business. One reasonably big annoyance is gaining access to logs or artifacts hosted in private AWS buckets. Buildkite provides links that don't (can't?) work because they don't go through an AWS login path. That said, we have a script: folks can copy the URL into and then download files with their own CLI auth. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Buildkite is an extremely modern CI framework that allows for a modular ci pipeline, provides the ability to create your own abstractions and supports monorepos and micro services. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Nothing really - it's very reliable, easy to run and affordable! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We achieved most of our goals in consolidating to a central, zero-trust, code-driven CICD platform using Buildkite. The tools and APIs are simple, well-considered components that we can compose into a wide variety of pipelines to suit our business. The company was responsive to all our initial questions, integration work and continues to support our users and our automated build and deploy requirements. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

A minor inconvenience is the granularity of permissions and interface, which stops us from achieving self-administration for our dev teams. We still require full-org administrators for some tasks - notably, Notifications. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The ability to ensure code stays within a controlled environment, even while using a SAAS platform. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Nothing to date. We've been able to deliver on all requirements. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Very easy to use, friendly UI and best CI tool I've used this far! Easy to see all your build steps, your builds all in one, and everything you'd need. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Not much I can think of... It seems to have all the features I need. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.