--- title: Buildkite Reviews meta\_title: 'Buildkite Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta\_description: Filter 27 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Buildkite works for a business like yours. aggregate\_rating: rating\_value: 4.8 review\_count: 27 scale: '5' date\_modified: '2026-08-11' parent\_category: name: CI/CD Tools url: https://www.g2.com/categories/ci-cd-tools --- ### Buildkite Pros and Cons: Top Advantages and Disadvantages #### Quick AI Summary Based on G2 Reviews Generated from real user reviews Users value the **highly customizable** features of Buildkite, which effectively address their CI needs through visualizations. [(1 mentions)](https://www.g2.com/products/buildkite/reviews?filters%5Bsentiment_snippet%5D=2329138&qs=pros-and-cons#reviews) Users value the **customizable visualization tools** in Buildkite for effectively understanding pipelines and issues. [(1 mentions)](https://www.g2.com/products/buildkite/reviews?filters%5Bsentiment_snippet%5D=2328896&qs=pros-and-cons#reviews) Users value the **helpful visualization tools** and **high customizability** of Buildkite for their CI needs. [(1 mentions)](https://www.g2.com/products/buildkite/reviews?filters%5Bsentiment_snippet%5D=2329121&qs=pros-and-cons#reviews) Users value the **flexibility** of Buildkite, allowing for customization to meet diverse CI pipeline requirements. [(1 mentions)](https://www.g2.com/products/buildkite/reviews?filters%5Bsentiment_snippet%5D=2329149&qs=pros-and-cons#reviews) Users value the **helpful visualization tools** in Buildkite for understanding pipelines and issues effectively. [(1 mentions)](https://www.g2.com/products/buildkite/reviews?filters%5Bsentiment_snippet%5D=2328917&qs=pros-and-cons#reviews) Users find a **somewhat steep learning curve** due to the extensive customization options available in Buildkite. [(1 mentions)](https://www.g2.com/products/buildkite/reviews?filters%5Bsentiment_snippet%5D=2329067&qs=pros-and-cons#reviews) Users find the **limited customization** options in Buildkite can create a challenging learning curve for new users. [(1 mentions)](https://www.g2.com/products/buildkite/reviews?filters%5Bsentiment_snippet%5D=2328908&qs=pros-and-cons#reviews) Users experience a **somewhat steep learning curve** due to the extensive customization options offered by Buildkite. [(1 mentions)](https://www.g2.com/products/buildkite/reviews?filters%5Bsentiment_snippet%5D=2329159&qs=pros-and-cons#reviews) ### Top Pros or Advantages of Buildkite ##### 1. Customization Users value the **highly customizable** features of Buildkite, which effectively address their CI needs through visualizations. [ See 1 mentions ](https://www.g2.com/products/buildkite/reviews?filters%5Bsentiment_snippet%5D=2329138&qs=pros-and-cons#reviews) See Related User Reviews ![Verified User](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User") U Verified User Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 4.5/5 "Great Visualization Tools and User-Friendly Interface" What do you like about Buildkite? Helpful visualization tools to understand pipeline and issues. Highly customizable to suit CI needs ##### 2. Feature Flags Users value the **customizable visualization tools** in Buildkite for effectively understanding pipelines and issues. [ See 1 mentions ](https://www.g2.com/products/buildkite/reviews?filters%5Bsentiment_snippet%5D=2328896&qs=pros-and-cons#reviews) See Related User Reviews ![Verified User](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User") U Verified User Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 4.5/5 "Great Visualization Tools and User-Friendly Interface" What do you like about Buildkite? Helpful visualization tools to understand pipeline and issues. Highly customizable to suit CI needs ##### 3. Features Users value the **helpful visualization tools** and **high customizability** of Buildkite for their CI needs. [ See 1 mentions ](https://www.g2.com/products/buildkite/reviews?filters%5Bsentiment_snippet%5D=2329121&qs=pros-and-cons#reviews) See Related User Reviews ![Verified User](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User") U Verified User Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 4.5/5 "Great Visualization Tools and User-Friendly Interface" What do you like about Buildkite? Helpful visualization tools to understand pipeline and issues. Highly customizable to suit CI needs ##### 4. Flexibility Users value the **flexibility** of Buildkite, allowing for customization to meet diverse CI pipeline requirements. [ See 1 mentions ](https://www.g2.com/products/buildkite/reviews?filters%5Bsentiment_snippet%5D=2329149&qs=pros-and-cons#reviews) See Related User Reviews ![Verified User](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User") U Verified User Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 4.5/5 "Great Visualization Tools and User-Friendly Interface" What do you like about Buildkite? Helpful visualization tools to understand pipeline and issues. Highly customizable to suit CI needs ##### 5. Pipeline Management Users value the **helpful visualization tools** in Buildkite for understanding pipelines and issues effectively. [ See 1 mentions ](https://www.g2.com/products/buildkite/reviews?filters%5Bsentiment_snippet%5D=2328917&qs=pros-and-cons#reviews) See Related User Reviews ![Verified User](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User") U Verified User Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 4.5/5 "Great Visualization Tools and User-Friendly Interface" What do you like about Buildkite? Helpful visualization tools to understand pipeline and issues. Highly customizable to suit CI needs ### Top Cons or Disadvantages of Buildkite ##### 1. Learning Curve Users find a **somewhat steep learning curve** due to the extensive customization options available in Buildkite. [ See 1 mentions ](https://www.g2.com/products/buildkite/reviews?filters%5Bsentiment_snippet%5D=2329067&qs=pros-and-cons#reviews) See Related User Reviews ![Verified User](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User") U Verified User Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 4.5/5 "Great Visualization Tools and User-Friendly Interface" What do you dislike about Buildkite? Somewhat steep learning curve given high level of customization ##### 2. Limited Customization Users find the **limited customization** options in Buildkite can create a challenging learning curve for new users. [ See 1 mentions ](https://www.g2.com/products/buildkite/reviews?filters%5Bsentiment_snippet%5D=2328908&qs=pros-and-cons#reviews) See Related User Reviews ![Verified User](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User") U Verified User Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 4.5/5 "Great Visualization Tools and User-Friendly Interface" What do you dislike about Buildkite? Somewhat steep learning curve given high level of customization ##### 3. Steep Learning Curve Users experience a **somewhat steep learning curve** due to the extensive customization options offered by Buildkite. [ See 1 mentions ](https://www.g2.com/products/buildkite/reviews?filters%5Bsentiment_snippet%5D=2329159&qs=pros-and-cons#reviews) See Related User Reviews ![Verified User](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User") U Verified User Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 4.5/5 "Great Visualization Tools and User-Friendly Interface" What do you dislike about Buildkite? Somewhat steep learning curve given high level of customization ## Top-Rated Alternatives [ ![GitHub](https://images.g2crowd.com/uploads/product/image/large_detail/large_detail_8ec3c17e3fb1df25b6a8bd7cc69cf2d1/github.png "GitHub") GitHub 4.7/5(2,397) ](https://www.g2.com/products/github/reviews) [ ![Jenkins](https://images.g2crowd.com/uploads/product/image/large_detail/large_detail_816e7e27d5ac09363053c4ca43e63c5c/jenkins.png "Jenkins") Jenkins 4.4/5(573) ](https://www.g2.com/products/jenkins/reviews) [ ![GitLab](https://images.g2crowd.com/uploads/product/hd_favicon/2397ccd7309ef2bca71e3a275d59a5a3/gitlab.svg "GitLab") GitLab 4.5/5(901) ](https://www.g2.com/products/gitlab/reviews) [ View All Alternatives ](https://www.g2.com/products/buildkite/competitors/alternatives) LT Laurence T. Senior Platform Engineer Enterprise (\> 1000 emp.) 6/15/2021 "Buildkite the tool and company helped us achieve our CI consolidation" 4.5/5 What do you like best about Buildkite? 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. What do you dislike about Buildkite? 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. What problems is Buildkite solving and how is that benefiting you? We required a central, third-party orchestrator for our CICD processes that helps us deploy our own build infrastructure (agents), has little or no access to our credentials and secrets, can be code-driven, provides appropriate user-directory integration, and so-on. We were able to achieve this with Buildkite. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerSource: Organic ![Joel C.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Joel C.") JC Joel C. Chief Technology Officer Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 12/17/2021 "Best in class CICD delivering the security of self-hosting with the efficiency of a SAAS solution." 5/5 What do you like best about Buildkite? The ability to ensure code stays within a controlled environment, even while using a SAAS platform. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Buildkite? Nothing to date. We've been able to deliver on all requirements. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering Buildkite: Seriously consider adopting Buildkite to deliver on your CI/CD requirements. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Buildkite solving and how is that benefiting you? CICD for applications and infrastructure deployment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More 12/18/2023 Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: Seller invite ![Verified User in Consumer Services](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User in Consumer Services") UC Verified User in Consumer Services Enterprise (\> 1000 emp.) 1/12/2022 "I use Buildkite everyday" 5/5 What do you like best about Buildkite? 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. What do you dislike about Buildkite? Not much I can think of... It seems to have all the features I need. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Buildkite solving and how is that benefiting you? Using it as a developer, to make sure all the CI steps pass in my branch. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Christopher F.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Christopher F.") CF Christopher F. DevOps Lead Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 4/1/2021 "Buildkite is CI tooling that's powerful enough to get the the job done without getting in the way" 5/5 What do you like best about Buildkite? Buildkite's biggest advantage is it's flexibility and extensibility of the platform without needing to reinvent the wheel for every little thing. The plugin system allows easy use of third party extensions, while also allowing teams to fork those extensions and customise as needed quickly. The simplicity and flexibility of the agent will enable teams to customise their own worker pools to meet specific needs. The community is also very welcoming and knowledgable; usually willing to share thier experiences and examples of how to solve problems. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Buildkite? The main weakness of Buildkite is the lack of reporting and dashboarding within the tooling. It would be helpful if there was a simple build status radiator page to use as a dashboard of failed builds. More reporting of build timings to help focus on areas of improvement would be great as well. Some kind of release management dashboarding would be great as well, providing a simple overview of the last build deployed per environment. This would make it a much more powerful CD platform also. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering Buildkite: Make sure that you leverage the elastic stack if you're on AWS. Make sure that you looking to the plugin system, and particularly how the library-example-buildkite-plugin for how you can easily share common code among different pipelines. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Buildkite solving and how is that benefiting you? We use Buildkite to manage all our CI across both monolithic and microservice applications, as well as serverless and infrastructure code. We also use it as a flexible job scheduler for adhoc scripts and processes. We've benefited by being able to keep complicated and specific pipelines with the code they're building, as well as leveraging plugins for more common patterns, reducing rework. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: Seller invite ![Tom M.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Tom M.") TM Tom M. Engineering Team Lead Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 3/30/2021 "The greatest CI that has supported my career for years" 5/5 What do you like best about Buildkite? Simplicity and extensibility of setup. Every company I've joined, we've switched to using Buildkite in short order. I'll be able to spin up a working setup within a day and prove why it is superior to any alternative. It has also been incredible in cutting edge technologies, to be able to move ahead without waiting for an 'all in' system to catch up, things like iOS and android direct testing. The UI is informative and intuitive with a direct tie-in to the simple yaml construction. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Buildkite? I have very few things I dislike, I miss the runnning build count being visible on all pages, I would also like 2FA SSO enforcement, search for log output across steps would also save some time. All minor product feature requests, nothing mission critical, and usually our wants suddenly appear in the app in due-cource. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering Buildkite: Try out a variety of CI providers, if you have an even moderate set of needs to be customized over time, Buildkite is quite simply the only choice. Nothing else on the market allows us to operate a very custom setup so easily, with expandability. It has been perfect with web, android, ios and a variety of languages and platforms that change annually. Without a doubt, it has personally improved both my development life, and my career, and continues to do so. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Buildkite solving and how is that benefiting you? Every day in my career using buildkite has made the products I've built easier, faster, more stable, and confident in our releases. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: Seller invite ![Jacob G.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Jacob G.") JG Jacob G. Staff Platform Engineer Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 3/26/2021 "A powerful Swiss Army knife for CI" 4.5/5 What do you like best about Buildkite? Buildkite balances the right abstraction level for CI in a way that allows for simple pipelines all the way up to quite complex workflows to be constructed simply. Unlike other CI services, Buildkite's YAML-based pipeline config is comprised of only 5 different step types (run command, wait for commands, block for approval, ask for user input, and trigger another pipeline) that are composable. This makes it simple for teammates to understand and configure pipelines without having to learn very complex syntaxes. Buildkite's runner agent is self-hosted, which allows us to run builds within our infrastructure, including custom IAM role access to our environments, in a way that's more secure than giving the CI service a static access key and secret. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Buildkite? Since Buildkite's agent that runs builds is self-hosted, there is some initial work required to set up an agent cluster. Buildkite provides an AWS-based preset, as well as a Kubernetes Helm chart, so this isn't too much of a hassle, but it requires more setup than fully-hosted CI services. This is both a plus and a minus though (see above), as we are in full control of the environment the agent runs in. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering Buildkite: Buildkite is awesome if you either need to self-host your CI job runners, or you are willing to set up a self-hosted job runner. It provides a lot of power using simple building blocks behind a slick UI, so once the agents are running, it's often easier to work with than other CI services. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Buildkite solving and how is that benefiting you? We use Buildkite to construct customized CI pipelines that run inside our infrastructure clusters - where other services like Circle CI or GitHub Actions primarily run inside the vendor's hosting environment, fully managed, with Buildkite we can run deploys inside AWS or inside Kubernetes. This allows us to control the access a build has to that infrastructure via IAM roles or Kubernetes service accounts in a very secure way. We also use Buildkite to construct a CI/CD system for Terraform. Buildkite has certain building blocks (control over global concurrency for a job type, the ability to block for user approval) that make it possible to create a safe pipeline for applying Terraform changes, with coordinated planned changes, approval requests, and a serial deploy queue. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More 9/26/2022 Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: Seller invite ![Daniel W.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Daniel W.") DW Daniel W. Principal Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 4/6/2021 "Very flexible and easy to use" 5/5 What do you like best about Buildkite? Setting up agents and configuring the jobs are very easy. The ability to dynamically generate and upload your pipeline is also super powerful. The user interface is very clean and easy to understand. I also really love how we can just set up agents anywhere we like; this helped some of our more security and privacy conscious clients. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Buildkite? They have so many awesome secret features that aren't documented, it's always a joy to find out that something I need is already built, but frustrating that I had to reach out to support to find out. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Buildkite solving and how is that benefiting you? Automation of our product builds and delivery. The main benefits have been the simplicity of setting up an agent anywhere you want and configuring it to do what you want it to do. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerSource: Seller invite ![Michael P.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Michael P.") MP Michael P. Engineering Manager Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 3/30/2021 "Best of both worlds of self-managed & SAAS CI" 5/5 What do you like best about Buildkite? Buildkite has always had excellent UI & overall UX for developers. Their model of allowing you to run builds on your own infrastructure (either in cloud or self-managed) allows for the best of both worlds: a user-friendly interface that you don't need to manage yourself along with full control over how your builds are run and on what type of infrastructure they're run on. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Buildkite? The buildkite.yml pipeline format can be sometimes confusing for new users - and YAML means that it's prone to accidental indent errors. I'd love it the service had native support for deployments & versioning, although this can be emulated with certain pipeline designs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Buildkite solving and how is that benefiting you? Buildkite orchestrates all CI (continuous integration) and some CD (continuous deployment) tasks at my workplace. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: Seller invite ![Shaun Y.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Shaun Y.") SY Shaun Y. Head of Web Marketing Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 3/30/2021 "Easy to deploy our webapp with BuildKite!" 4.5/5 What do you like best about Buildkite? Works great once everything was hooked up - as a web developer I never really had to worry much about the server or infrastructure deployment commands, even when BuildKite was firing off a chain of multiple tools that included our build, containerization and putting it into Kubernetes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Buildkite? It took a while for me to grok, mostly because our internal setup was quite complex, so there were quite a few steps required. I eventually overcame and was able to keep our web app updated on my own mostly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering Buildkite: It seems to make it easy on the actual people running the operational side of things. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Buildkite solving and how is that benefiting you? Having a repeatable way to deploy my webapp without needing ops support. In the event of a problem, I could debug my side of the code, while ops had context from other app environments to help with fixes. That facilitated easy communication and separation of concerns between the teams. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Validated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: Seller invite ![Verified User in Computer Software](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User in Computer Software") AC Verified User in Computer Software Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 4/1/2021 "This is the best CI/CD tool that can be customized to any company needs" 5/5 What do you like best about Buildkite? The best part about Buildkite is that it fits any project complexity. It allows you to build a pipeline that matches your delivery process, and it works well with complex projects that contain multiple pipelines and approval steps. It is easy to extend buildkite using existing plugins and it is super easy to create your own plugins if needed. Our whole team liked the simplistic (yet powerful) UI that is super-fast and responsive. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Buildkite? It is a bit uncomfortable to have an initial "pipeline upload" step defined in Buildkite UI (not as a code). However with a new buildkite terraform provider it is possible to have the initial pipeline configuration stored in the codebase. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Buildkite solving and how is that benefiting you? - Managed CI/CD service, so we don't need to maintain a service internally. - Buildkite agents are running in our infrastructure, so we can do CI and CD using the same tool without compromising the security. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. 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