--- title: Buildbot Reviews meta_title: 'Buildbot Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 20 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Buildbot works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.3 review_count: 20 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-06-04' parent_category: name: CI/CD Tools url: https://www.g2.com/categories/ci-cd-tools --- # Buildbot Reviews **Vendor:** Buildbot **Category:** [Continuous Delivery Tools](https://www.g2.com/categories/continuous-delivery-tools) **Average Rating:** 4.3/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 20 ## About Buildbot At its core, Buildbot is a job scheduling system: it queues jobs, executes the jobs when the required resources are available, and reports the results. ## Buildbot Reviews ### 1. CI perspective of Buildbot **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Anurag k. | Senior DevOps Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 02, 2021 **What do you like best about Buildbot?** There’s a learning curve in buildbot as it’s written mostly using Python over the twisted libraries. Unlike jenkins, even for a small configuration change you need to interact with the python code. The way schedulers or pollers are configured, every thing is very flexible and does not restrict you to UI. **What do you dislike about Buildbot?** The UI could have been more intuitive to show some extra details such as some more build related information on the builder’s page itself. It’s not that it requires a major change in the upstream code but getting that as a package from the buildbot team will add more confidence to it. Another bug that I have been seeing with buildbot 2.7.0 is the reconfiguration issue. When a reconfiguration is done at the time the polling is happening in the background, the process hangs and then it keeps saying “reconfiguration is going on for xxx seconds.” The buildbot needs to be restarted then for the new changes to takr effect. **What problems is Buildbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** I have been working as a DevOps engineer and maintaining the buildbot infrastructure end to end. The team that I work for deals extensively with llvm upstream code. To stay inline with the llvm community we use buildbot instead of Jenkins. This very system can be designed using jenkins as well however it will require so many different scripts and their templates to achieve what we do here using just one master configuration and defining all the builders there. We have 50000+ lines of code of our own other than the buildbot upstream code to facilitate the developers with high quality compiler builds. ### 2. Great tool with lots of potential **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 10, 2020 **What do you like best about Buildbot?** Buildbot is easy to use and hooks up with GitHub perfectly. We can have our custom implementations of secret service and Buildbot does a great job of concealing it **What do you dislike about Buildbot?** Buildbot does not have the API calling facility for enterprise github. It has to be done via UI. There are some minor bugs you may encounter hence a good opening to contribute to them **What problems is Buildbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** CI/CD Image building pipeline with packer automating using buildbot ### 3. Well documented and relatively easy learning curve. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospitality | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 18, 2021 **What do you like best about Buildbot?** The documentation is rich and easy to read and understand. It makes building a pipeline very easy and accessible. **What do you dislike about Buildbot?** Using Python, it isn't a language I am familiar with. **What problems is Buildbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** Allows us to automate building and deploy out software to VMs. ### 4. Buildbot awesome CI tool **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Will W. | Senior Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 25, 2018 **What do you like best about Buildbot?** Bash scripting intuitively through the API calls. **What do you dislike about Buildbot?** I sometimes appreciate the GUI nature of Jenkins better and I wish there were more Buildbot examples. Also I don't know why Buildbot doesn't integrate with the popular github and gitlab vendors or bit bucket. **Recommendations to others considering Buildbot:** Please add integrations to all git cloud repos such as bitbucket, github and gitlab. **What problems is Buildbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** Quality and weekly builds, automation. We have streamlined our entire build process with dozens of packages that build into one release. We build and run unit tests for both native and cross compile builds. ### 5. A solid albeit poorly documented continuous integration server **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Miguel Angel A. | Instructor Professor, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 22, 2016 **What do you like best about Buildbot?** Python, period. Installation and configuration are easy once you find out where the documentation is. Since it uses python it can integrate with any other python tool or library, allowing for very specific and fine grained configuration options. It also is quite easy to maintain once in production. **What do you dislike about Buildbot?** It's online documentation is very sparse and it is very difficult to find docs for a consistent version number. Most of my gripes are with the Buildbot Website itself more than the product. **Recommendations to others considering Buildbot:** Unless you have already done it, deploying Buildbot needs quite a good amount of research due to how sparse and disjointed it's documentation is. That said, the Buildbot community is very helpful and kind to external users. **What problems is Buildbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** I have used Buildbot for a privately funded development project for an Android app (Coordenada Segura). We used Buildbot to generate nightly snapshots and verify correct code compilation after sprints. I have also used Buildbot as an automatic Debian package generator for a currently classified project for the Venezuelan Centro Nacional de Tecnologías de Información (CNTI). ### 6. Simple Automated Builds **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Stewart H. | Principle Engineer, Financial Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 28, 2016 **What do you like best about Buildbot?** This is my favorite build system. It has recently replaced Jenkins as my main build pipeline as for a larger project with several dependencies, it makes it much easier to see the failure cause. Additionally, I enjoyed the fact that it is customizable in the sense that I can code a step that I would like to achieve. Other models such as Jenkins and TeamCity make this pretty hard with the plugin heavy model. **What do you dislike about Buildbot?** The learning curve to get started with this was much heavier than I expected going into it. To get started on this product, it took twice as long as I had estimated due to the learning curve. As far as look and feel, both this and Jenkins feel pretty dated to TeamCity but then again, not the goal of this software. **Recommendations to others considering Buildbot:** Setup a server/worker in docker and experiment with your project. There will be some solid learning to occur as this build system is not like any other that you have used, I suspect. Be ready to spend some time doing this before going to production with it. **What problems is Buildbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** Continuous integration of our primary software product. It has made it much easier to pinpoint the failure cause and made it very easy to support a trunk only development style. ### 7. Buildbot: The Continuous Integration Python framework **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Aivars K. | Lead Software Architect, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 14, 2016 **What do you like best about Buildbot?** It is written in Python and it can be heavily customized through configuration file. It supports many operating systems and we were running it even on old HP-UX server with PA-RISC CPUs. Performance was surprisingly good and an old desktop PC was able to run Buildbot master for years. **What do you dislike about Buildbot?** Flexibility comes with a cost and you have to be a programmer to do something beyond trivial. Some of Buildbot extensions were hard to customize and reuse (MailNotifier, GitPoller) and we ended up writing functionality from scratch. Web interface did not have support for multiple projects and history of build status over time, we had to build our own. **Recommendations to others considering Buildbot:** Get a Python developer **What problems is Buildbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have more than 1000 Git repositories with C++ and some Java, Python and Delphi code and no problems with Buildbot performance. One instance of Buildbot is used for CI. It builds and runs unit-tests after each change on 11 servers with different versions of Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX, Oracle Database and Oracle Tuxedo. All changes are built on a fast server first and sent to other slower servers only after build and tests succeed - few lines of Buildbot configuration did that.. The same instance does full nightly builds. Second instance of Buildbot is used to schedule builds of patches and upgrades for each of our customers. Employee can request to build a list of modules on a specific combination of OS and Oracle and gets a notification when the build is ready. Before Buildbot at least one employee was doing that full-time and some employees once in a while. ### 8. Deployment automation and visualization easily by Buildbot **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** David L. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 23, 2016 **What do you like best about Buildbot?** Can setup automatic deployment for my python/php applications in less than half an hour, even in minutes. The deployment process and result can be viewed by different people at the same time. I can easily setup rollback builder for an application. By ChoiceStringParameter a builder can take backup deployment application path as parameters. It support basic authentication. **What do you dislike about Buildbot?** The UI is ugly and not so user friendly. The code structure isn't simple enough to read, in version after 0.9 the code structure changed a lot, and it takes me lots of time than expected to hack into the code. **Recommendations to others considering Buildbot:** Don't forget to enable the authorization for a public deployment. Use the latest version. It is a deployment automation tool for developers, you should know the basics of python before starting. **What problems is Buildbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** We need to run a couple of command in terminal during a deployment, update the code, update the configuration files, backup current deployment, and run some initialization command. It takes lots of time and process is a blackbox to the team. Buildbot boost our release productivity and helped to achieve deployment visualization and transparency. ### 9. Useful software tool for continuous integration **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nicholas M. | Research Engineer, Research, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 11, 2016 **What do you like best about Buildbot?** Buildbot is a software tool written in python. As a result, it inherits many of the python advantages, namely readability and simple syntax. Furthermore, the core conceptual paradigm of the software is simple and well-documented. In my experience, the software scaled quite well. We had many more than 30 svn repos attached to a single buildbot instance, with continuous integration across suites of regression tests upon check in. This is critical for an effective CI suite, as it encourages extensive regression testing across a variety of environments, releases, etc. Finally, as buildbot's dependencies are python and twisted, it is quick and easy to install. **What do you dislike about Buildbot?** The greatest weakness of buildbot I encountered was the difficulty in debugging the configuration files. While there is a script provided that can provide an accurate yay/nay on if the configuration file will result in a successful run, in practice the error messages it provided did not help greatly in finding the location of syntax errors. The other issue I had was with adding remote buildslaves. In principle, buildslaves on different machines/architectures can be added so long as they can remotely connect to the buildmaster. This is quite useful for CI across an array of environments. In practice, it was challenging and very error-prone to set this up correctly. **What problems is Buildbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our use was for scientific software applications, principally with high performance computing. The codebases were typically on the order of 10k -- 100k SLOC, in Python, C/C++ or Fortran. These libraries had complicated dependency chains, often requiring a build to be linked against ten or more software libraries. ### 10. CI:CD with Buildbot **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Abdel K. | Sr. Cloud Engineering Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 07, 2016 **What do you like best about Buildbot?** Its written in python and the level of customization we have control of. Since its written in python, it integrated very well with us (we are a python shop). For example, we use github heavily and setup our buildbot to wait for no more pushes on a branch for about 15 seconds before it triggers a build. This feature is simple to setup in buildbot and a complete pain (if at all possible) in jenkins. **What do you dislike about Buildbot?** The UI is very clunky. Reading the documentation to know how to extend buildbot to post to slack for example, was not easy. Been waiting for a .9.x release a long time because it address some fixes regarding the git poller. **Recommendations to others considering Buildbot:** Learn python? **What problems is Buildbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** We used buildbot to allow us to do continuous integration and continuous deployment. The problem we solved with buildbot was the ability to scale up and down instances dynamically on aws to build projects on demand. We had a buildbot master that was integrated with boto to scale up on specific builds. Worked great ! ### 11. Excellent tool for test automation **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Naresh M. | Software Architect, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 07, 2016 **What do you like best about Buildbot?** Open sourced, GPLed, minimal dependency, written in python and can be hosted locally which is very much what I need for my opensource/personal projects. It is also not that high on system requirements and doesn't need separate resources (like Jenkins for instance). **What do you dislike about Buildbot?** Initial setup is perplexing, there are no recipes available, reading through the documentation is mandatory to even start understanding, no sample configuration files (need to be created once you follow the tutorial), lack of more complex tutorials for different types of projects. One needs to understand the concept of buildbot properly to really get what buildbot is doing. For people like me who are testing multiple build systems, sometimes this initial effort is way too high. **Recommendations to others considering Buildbot:** Really depends on the kind of projects being implemented as well as the goals being pursued. But BuildBot is very good for stack testing and automation. I guess it is not so much if you are into client side applications since it will require more customizations and there are already much better recipe tools available to provide the CI support. Since I was the only developer for my projects, I am kind of trying to use whatever is available instead of customizing and maintaining a build/CI system. Recipes for BuildBot are very hard to find (or at least were when I wanted to use it for my projects). **What problems is Buildbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am using various build automation and CI tools for my projects. Basically want to make sure that none of the commits going in break the already integrated and tested functionality. Mostly I use it for CI and release builds. ### 12. Buildbot for CI **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consumer Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 01, 2016 **What do you like best about Buildbot?** Ease of setup, multi-platform support. Automating the builds and test to provide immediate feedback to developers helps in delivering better software. **What do you dislike about Buildbot?** Compared to other CI tools like Jenkins, buildbot does not do parsing, presenting results in pretty ways out of the box **Recommendations to others considering Buildbot:** Perfect for continuous integration, continuous deployment and release management. **What problems is Buildbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** Build automation , continuous integration ### 13. Best CI Tool that i have ever used! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Colin W. | Webdesigner, Webmaster, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 06, 2016 **What do you like best about Buildbot?** The best thing is that you don't get any fixed CI tool like Jenkins and Co. Using this tool is more like you doing your own "Continuous Integration". This means that you may have to write more code, but the good thing is you could do anything you want. **What do you dislike about Buildbot?** The documentation is not that good at this time. **What problems is Buildbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** I using Buildbot for all my django websites hosted on one server including buildbot itself. This tool running very efficient and uses a very small amount of memory, but this depends most likely on what you are going to do with it. ### 14. extensible continuous integration **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Fernando J. P. | DevOps Automation Engineer, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 19, 2016 **What do you like best about Buildbot?** Buildbot is written in python and thus is easy to extend/integrate in any number of ways. includes json api, templatized ui, and distributed (master and slaves) architecture. **What do you dislike about Buildbot?** there is little online support, as not widely used yet, but the documentation is good. there is also a mailing list. the "automatic slaves" in ec2 needs work **Recommendations to others considering Buildbot:** there is a steep customization learning curve **What problems is Buildbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** automated builds upon code checkin. much easier to extend than the Jenkins plugin model. ### 15. Excellent and flexible CI tool **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 12, 2016 **What do you like best about Buildbot?** Buildbot is an very flexible CI tool for auto-building/test/deployment. Within its python-writen configuration file, you could almost do anything that a python script can. On my own experience of using buildbot, I even modified its source code to meet my specific demands like many other buildbot users. **What do you dislike about Buildbot?** 1. Lack of documentations. Many time you need to directly read buildbot source code or others' config examples to get clear how a function works and how to configure it. 2. You need spend a lot of time (maybe days) writing its complex configuration file (maybe thousand lines). It's a little hard for beginners who just want a click and go, but is very powerful and customizable if you get familiar with it. **Recommendations to others considering Buildbot:** Apart from official documentation, the i3wm buildbot setup guide is also worth reading if you want to give it a try. https://i3wm.org/docs/buildbot.html **What problems is Buildbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** Auto building, testing, packaging with gerrit across different platforms and architectures. ### 16. Depends on the application, but this seems like a solid tool **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 08, 2016 **What do you like best about Buildbot?** This seems like a very nice framework if you are working with Unix-based systems and applications that lend themselves be used with tools like Jenkins and the like, but with better flexibility. **What do you dislike about Buildbot?** Sadly, for our application, we needed some setup that allowed us to test on custom hardware using a proprietary platform on Windows. And since one of the main development languages was Matlab, I had a hard time seeing how to justify the use of BuildBot for our needs at that time and went with a different approach **What problems is Buildbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** In our case, we have Scientific Data Acquisition and Analisys software that must be run on a variety of custom hardware builds. BuildBot did not meet our requirements, but its flexibility seems like a great selling point. If in the future we are not bound by our current constraints we'll be sure to give it another go. We have since built a simple Continuous Integration and Build Automation system tailored to our needs. ### 17. Very useful for automating builds, tests, and deployment **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ernie H. | Senior Engineer, Computer Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 12, 2016 **What do you like best about Buildbot?** Community and developers are extremely engaged and helpful - very expressive python configuration syntax and flexible/extensible UI and architecture. **What do you dislike about Buildbot?** Some architecture features are under-developed, which I'm sure will improve in time. **Recommendations to others considering Buildbot:** Give it a try - it's very easy to set up an initial configuration. **What problems is Buildbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** Automating high volume of complex builds, tests, and deployments across many platforms and architectures. ### 18. buildbot **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 06, 2016 **What do you like best about Buildbot?** Buildbot is very flexible. The configuration file being a normal python script has allowed us to customize it easily to our environment. **What do you dislike about Buildbot?** We don't really have much complaints. We have been using the beta because it brings significant ui improvements, as a result we've experienced some instability. **What problems is Buildbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** We replaced an in-house build automation program with buildbot. We use it to build a deploy test builds internally. ### 19. Continuous integration like butter **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Charlie K. | Test Staff Engineer, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 12, 2015 **What do you like best about Buildbot?** The flexibility of the framework. When one thinks of it in a framework vs a product, Buildbot becomes much more. Design and use the framework to fit you needs **What do you dislike about Buildbot?** Since I approach it as a framework, the concepts are easier to grasp. If you're looking for click and go, it will be frustrating. **Recommendations to others considering Buildbot:** Design and use the framework to help build your process. It's definitely not click and go (ala the other well known CI tool). Administration is simple, there's great support, setup is easy (or not so easy if you're not familiar with Python) **What problems is Buildbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** Simply keeping mainline branches clean ### 20. I used buildbot as a tool for continuous integration **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Research | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 05, 2015 **What do you like best about Buildbot?** I like the fact that it is simple to set up the whole master-slave configuration and that you have enough control over the building process. Real-time logs are also very helpful. **What do you dislike about Buildbot?** I dislike the quality of the user interface. Also, there are some features that are mentioned in the docs, but not described in details. **Recommendations to others considering Buildbot:** Buildbot is a tool that is simple to configure and easy to use. It is a good choice for enabling continuous integration process for a cross-platform software. Tip: Checkout the latent buildslave option. It is a very helpful feature in our case. **What problems is Buildbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** I used buildbot to accomplish build automation and continuous integration. Buildbot is simple and easy to use software. ## Buildbot Discussions - [What is Buildbot used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-buildbot-used-for) - [View Buildbot pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/buildbot/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-06-25+09%3A30%3A39+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=d87d6f3b-50e9-4a01-a5ec-5b46eb40fd20&secure%5Btoken%5D=faaa531c287b11d5686f2d480139949ff35dd135b49c4a42bc9872691a4c99c2&format=llm_user) ## Buildbot Features **Functionality** - Deployment-Ready Staging - Integration - Extensible **Functionality** - Integrations - Extensibility - Test Customization **Management** - Processes and Workflow - Reporting - Automation **Management** - Automation - Processes and Workflow - Reporting **Agentic AI - Continuous Integration** - Autonomous Task Execution - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Natural Language Interaction - Proactive Assistance **Agentic AI - Continuous Delivery** - Autonomous Task Execution - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Natural Language Interaction - Proactive Assistance ## Top Buildbot Alternatives - [Jenkins](https://www.g2.com/products/jenkins/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (554 reviews) - [Bamboo](https://www.g2.com/products/bamboo/reviews) - 4.1/5.0 (68 reviews) - [Travis CI](https://www.g2.com/products/travis-ci/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (92 reviews)