GitHub Actions vs CircleCI
CI/CD native to GitHub — workflows + marketplace + hosted runners
vs. Fast, configurable CI/CD with Docker, ARM, GPU runners and orbs
Pricing tiers
GitHub Actions
Public Repos
$0. Free unlimited minutes on hosted runners (Linux). No private runners.
$0 base (usage-based)
Free (Personal)
$0. 2,000 minutes/mo private repos (Linux). 500MB Packages storage.
Free
Per-minute Overage
$0.008/min Linux ($0.08 macOS, $0.016 Windows) after included minutes.
$0/mo
Team
$4/user/mo. 3,000 minutes/mo. 2GB storage. Org management.
$4/mo
Enterprise
$21/user/mo. 50,000 minutes/mo. 50GB storage. SAML SSO, audit.
$21/mo
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
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing free on GitHub Actions vs free on CircleCI.
| Metric | GitHub Actions | CircleCI |
|---|---|---|
| No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers. | ||
Features
GitHub Actions · 18 features
- Actions Cache — Persistent cache across runs.
- Actions Marketplace — 20K+ reusable actions.
- ARC (K8s Controller) — Autoscale self-hosted on K8s.
- Artifacts — Upload/download job outputs.
- Composite Actions — Actions made of other actions.
- Concurrency Groups — Cancel / queue overlapping runs.
- Container Jobs — Run a whole job in a Docker image.
- Environments + Approvals — Gate deploys with manual approval.
- Job Summaries — Markdown summaries in UI.
- Larger Runners — 4-64 vCPU, ARM, GPU.
- Matrix Strategy — Fan out over axes.
- OIDC Cloud Auth — Exchange JWT for cloud credentials.
- Reusable Workflows — workflow_call.
- Secrets + Variables — Encrypted org/repo/env secrets.
- Self-Hosted Runners — Your own runners.
- Service Containers — Sidecar containers (DBs, Redis) per job.
- Triggers — push, pull_request, schedule, workflow_dispatch, etc.
- Workflows — Event-driven YAML workflows.
CircleCI · 17 features
- ARM + GPU Runners — ARM64 + T4 GPU resource classes.
- .circleci/config.yml — Single source of truth (YAML 2.1).
- 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
| Kind | GitHub Actions | CircleCI |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | gh run CLI | circleci CLI |
| SDK | @actions/* toolkit | — |
| REST | GitHub Actions REST API | CircleCI REST API v2 |
| GRAPHQL | GitHub GraphQL (Actions) | — |
| OTHER | Actions Marketplace, Actions Tab (Web), workflow_* webhooks, Workflow YAML | .circleci/config.yml, CircleCI Orbs Registry, CircleCI Webhooks, CircleCI Web UI, Self-Hosted Runner |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to GitHub Actions and CircleCI are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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