Staxly

Buildkite vs CircleCI: pricing, quotas & features (2025)

Hybrid CI/CD — your compute, their orchestration. Built for scale.
vs. Fast, configurable CI/CD with Docker, ARM, GPU runners and orbs

Data sourced from vendor documentation · Last updated May 2026

Buildkite website ↗CircleCI website ↗

Summary

Buildkite and CircleCI are both cicd platforms, addressing the same core use case with different implementation philosophies and trade-offs. Both offer a free tier, making it easy to prototype without a credit card. Buildkite's paid plans start at $0/month, lower than CircleCI's entry point at $15/month. Both have 17 documented features in Staxly's catalog. Budget-sensitive teams will find Buildkite easier to justify early on. All pricing and quota data below is sourced from Buildkite and CircleCI's official documentation — not generated by AI or estimated.

Buildkite vs CircleCI: Comparativa de precios, cuotas y características (2025)

En esta comparativa analizamos Buildkite y CircleCI lado a lado — incluyendo precios mensuales, límites del tier gratuito, características técnicas, cuotas de uso (almacenamiento, transferencia, usuarios activos mensuales) y los interfaces de desarrollo disponibles. Todos los datos proceden de la documentación oficial de cada proveedor, no de respuestas generadas por IA.

Buildkite es una plataforma de la categoría cicd — Hybrid CI/CD — your compute, their orchestration. Built for scale.. Ofrece 4 tiers de precio: Free (Developer) gratuito, Buildkite Hosted (usage) desde $0/mes, Pro desde $20/mes, Enterprise (personalizado). Su catálogo en Staxly documenta 17 características y 7 interfazes para desarrolladores.

CircleCI pertenece a la categoría cicd — Fast, configurable CI/CD with Docker, ARM, GPU runners and orbs. Ofrece 4 tiers de precio: Free gratuito, Performance desde $15/mes, Scale desde $2000/mes, CircleCI Server (personalizado). Su catálogo documenta 17 características y 7 interfazes para desarrolladores.

A continuación encontrarás los tiers de precio completos de ambas plataformas, una matriz de cuotas del tier gratuito (transferencia, almacenamiento, MAU, llamadas a la API y otros límites), el listado completo de características y los interfaces (CLI, SDKs, REST, GraphQL, MCP) disponibles para integrar cada servicio.

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Pricing tiers

Buildkite

Free (Developer)
$0. Unlimited jobs on self-hosted agents. 10K jobs/mo on Buildkite Hosted.
Free
Buildkite Hosted (usage)
Per-minute on Buildkite-hosted agents. $0.002/min Linux baseline.
$0/mo
Pro
$20/user/mo. SSO. Audit log. Support. Unlimited self-hosted.
$20/mo
Enterprise
Custom. SAML, RBAC, audit SLA, dedicated support.
Custom
Buildkite website ↗

CircleCI

Free
$0. 6,000 build minutes/mo (Linux medium). 30 users. Unlimited projects.
Free
Performance
$15/mo (3 users). Credit-based: 80K-240K credits/mo bundles. More concurrency.
$15/mo
Scale
$2,000/mo+ (custom). High concurrency, self-hosted runner support, SSO.
$2000/mo
CircleCI Server
Custom. On-prem deployment of CircleCI. Enterprise only.
Custom
CircleCI website ↗

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

Comparing free on Buildkite vs free on CircleCI.

MetricBuildkiteCircleCI
No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers.

Features

Buildkite · 17 features

  • Agent Queues — Route jobs to specific agents by tag.
  • Annotations — Rich Markdown in build UI.
  • Artifacts — Upload + download build artifacts.
  • Audit Log — Enterprise audit.
  • Automatic + Manual Retries — Configurable retry semantics.
  • Automatic Cancel — Cancel stale builds on new push.
  • Buildkite Hosted Agents — Managed agents (opt-in).
  • Dynamic Pipelines — Generate YAML in a command step.
  • Parallelism — Parallel step scaling with BUILDKITE_PARALLEL_JOB.
  • Pipelines — YAML + optional dynamic upload.
  • Plugins — Agent-level lifecycle hooks.
  • Secrets (Vault) — Integrate with HashiCorp Vault, SSM.
  • Teams + RBAC — Enterprise permissions.
  • Test Engine — Flaky test + timing insights.
  • input Step — Block for user input.
  • trigger Step — Fire another pipeline.
  • wait Step — Sync point in pipeline.

CircleCI · 17 features

  • .circleci/config.yml — Single source of truth (YAML 2.1).
  • ARM + GPU Runners — ARM64 + T4 GPU resource classes.
  • Contexts — Org-scoped shared env vars.
  • Deploy Markers — Track deployments + rollback.
  • Docker Layer Caching — Reuse Docker layers.
  • Dynamic Config — Generate config based on changed paths.
  • Manual Approval — Gate workflows with manual step.
  • Matrix Jobs — Parameterized parallel jobs.
  • Orbs — Packaged reusable jobs + commands.
  • Parallelism — Split a job across N parallel containers.
  • Rerun with SSH — SSH into failed job.
  • Restricted Contexts — RBAC for secrets.
  • Scheduled Pipelines — Cron-triggered runs.
  • Self-Hosted Runners — On your infra.
  • Test Insights — Flaky test detection + trends.
  • Test Splitting — By timings, filenames, classnames.
  • Workflows (DAG) — Fan out, fan in, conditional.

Developer interfaces

KindBuildkiteCircleCI
CLIbk (Buildkite CLI)circleci CLI
RESTBuildkite REST APICircleCI REST API v2
GRAPHQLBuildkite GraphQL API—
OTHERBuildkite Agent, Buildkite Dashboard, Buildkite Plugins, pipeline.yml.circleci/config.yml, CircleCI Orbs Registry, CircleCI Web UI, CircleCI Webhooks, Self-Hosted Runner

Key takeaways

  • Both Buildkite and CircleCI offer a free tier — Buildkite ("Free (Developer)") and CircleCI ("Free") — with no credit card required to start.
  • The entry-level paid plan is $0/month for Buildkite (Buildkite Hosted (usage)) vs. $15/month for CircleCI (Performance).
  • Both platforms have 17 documented features in Staxly's catalog.
  • Developer integrations differ: only Buildkite offers GRAPHQL.
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Some links to Buildkite and CircleCI may be affiliate links — Staxly may earn a commission if you sign up through them, at no extra cost to you. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.

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