Staxly

GitHub Actions vs LangSmith

CI/CD native to GitHub — workflows + marketplace + hosted runners
vs. LLM observability, testing & evaluation — by LangChain

GitHub ActionsLangSmith website

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
GitHub Actions

LangSmith

Developer (Free)
Free forever. 5,000 traces/month. 14-day retention. 1 seat. Basic evaluations.
Free
Plus
$39/seat/month. 10k base traces included ($2.50 per 1k overage). Full evaluations, custom dashboards, email support.
$39/mo
Enterprise
Custom. Self-host option, SSO, custom retention, dedicated support.
Custom
LangSmith website

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

Comparing free on GitHub Actions vs developer on LangSmith.

MetricGitHub ActionsLangSmith
No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers.

Features

GitHub Actions · 18 features

  • Actions CachePersistent cache across runs.
  • Actions Marketplace20K+ reusable actions.
  • ARC (K8s Controller)Autoscale self-hosted on K8s.
  • ArtifactsUpload/download job outputs.
  • Composite ActionsActions made of other actions.
  • Concurrency GroupsCancel / queue overlapping runs.
  • Container JobsRun a whole job in a Docker image.
  • Environments + ApprovalsGate deploys with manual approval.
  • Job SummariesMarkdown summaries in UI.
  • Larger Runners4-64 vCPU, ARM, GPU.
  • Matrix StrategyFan out over axes.
  • OIDC Cloud AuthExchange JWT for cloud credentials.
  • Reusable Workflowsworkflow_call.
  • Secrets + VariablesEncrypted org/repo/env secrets.
  • Self-Hosted RunnersYour own runners.
  • Service ContainersSidecar containers (DBs, Redis) per job.
  • Triggerspush, pull_request, schedule, workflow_dispatch, etc.
  • WorkflowsEvent-driven YAML workflows.

LangSmith · 14 features

  • AlertsThreshold alerts on latency, cost, eval metrics.
  • Annotation QueuesHuman-review workflows for trace quality rating.
  • Custom DashboardsAggregate metrics dashboards per project/tag.
  • DatasetsCollect examples → use as eval sets or training data.
  • EvaluationsLLM-as-judge, embedding similarity, custom Python evaluators, offline batch eval
  • LangChain IntegrationAuto-trace any LangChain/LangGraph run with env var.
  • LangGraph IntegrationFirst-class trace + eval for LangGraph agents.
  • LLM TracingAutomatic trace every LLM call + tool call + chain step.
  • OpenTelemetry ExportExport traces as OTLP to Datadog/Honeycomb/etc.
  • PlaygroundTest prompts + models inline before deploying.
  • Prompt CanvasVisual prompt editor with live test + eval.
  • Prompt HubPublic + private prompt library with versioning.
  • Self-Hosted (Enterprise)Docker + k8s deployment in your infra.
  • Threads + SessionsGroup traces into conversational sessions.

Developer interfaces

KindGitHub ActionsLangSmith
CLIgh run CLILangSmith CLI
SDK@actions/* toolkitlangsmith-js, langsmith-python
RESTGitHub Actions REST APILangSmith REST API
GRAPHQLGitHub GraphQL (Actions)
MCPLangSmith MCP
OTHERActions Marketplace, Actions Tab (Web), workflow_* webhooks, Workflow YAMLLangSmith Dashboard
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to GitHub Actions and LangSmith are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.

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