Buildkite vs Temporal
Hybrid CI/CD — your compute, their orchestration. Built for scale.
vs. Durable execution platform for mission-critical workflows
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
Temporal
Self-Hosted (OSS)
Free forever. MIT license. Run the Temporal cluster yourself on K8s/Docker.
$0 base (usage-based)
Cloud (usage-based)
Temporal Cloud. Pay per action ($25 per 1M actions base). Active user + storage also billed.
$0 base (usage-based)
Business Plan
Starts ~$100/mo commit. Multi-region, SSO, priority support.
Custom
Enterprise
Custom. HIPAA, PCI, dedicated clusters, enterprise SLA.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing free on Buildkite vs oss on Temporal.
| Metric | Buildkite | Temporal |
|---|---|---|
| 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 Cancel — Cancel stale builds on new push.
- Automatic + Manual Retries — Configurable retry semantics.
- Buildkite Hosted Agents — Managed agents (opt-in).
- Dynamic Pipelines — Generate YAML in a command step.
- input Step — Block for user input.
- 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.
- trigger Step — Fire another pipeline.
- wait Step — Sync point in pipeline.
Temporal · 16 features
- Activities — Retryable units of work.
- Activity Retries — Declarative retry policies.
- Child Workflows — Nested workflow composition.
- Continue-As-New — Close + restart workflow to prune history.
- Nexus (cross-namespace) — Call workflows across namespaces/teams.
- Queries — Synchronous read of workflow state.
- Saga / Compensations — Rollback pattern via compensating activities.
- Schedules — Cron-like recurring workflows.
- Self-Host — Deploy cluster on your infra.
- Signals — Async messages into a running workflow.
- Timers — Durable sleeps — hours, days, months.
- Update — Synchronous RPC into workflow with validation.
- Visibility + Search Attrs — Query workflow state via Elasticsearch/native store.
- Web UI — Inspect workflow history, events, stack.
- Workflows — Durable, replayable, long-running functions.
- Workflow Versioning — Patch workflow code without breaking in-flight runs.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Buildkite | Temporal |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | bk (Buildkite CLI) | temporal CLI |
| SDK | — | Temporal Go SDK, temporalio (Python), @temporalio (TypeScript), Temporal Java SDK, Temporal .NET SDK, Temporal PHP SDK |
| REST | Buildkite REST API | — |
| GRAPHQL | Buildkite GraphQL API | — |
| OTHER | Buildkite Agent, Buildkite Dashboard, Buildkite Plugins, pipeline.yml | Temporal gRPC API, Temporal Web UI |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Buildkite and Temporal are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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