CI/CD Simplified: Comparing Buildbot, Jenkins, and GitHub Actions

If you’re setting up a CI/CD pipeline, choosing the right tool is a big decision – a good CI system can save time, catch bugs early, and make deployments less stressful. But with so many options out there, figuring out what works best for your team can be overwhelming. In this post, I’ll break down three of the most popular CI/CD tools – Buildbot, Jenkins, and GitHub Actions (GHA) – and share some tips on making them work for you. I’ll also talk about a couple of helper tools that can make your CI workflow even smoother.

CI/CD tools vary widely in features and approaches, but at their core, the biggest distinctions boil down to two considerations:

• Should CI maintenance be concentrated in a dedicated team or distributed among all developers in the project?
• Does your team prefer a self-managed solution or a fully-hosted cloud service?

Answering these questions and understanding how they affect your workflows can help you choose a tool with the right balance between control, flexibility, needed expertise, and ease of maintenance.

Buildbot: Centralized and customizable

Buildbot is an on-prem CI tool known for its centralized architecture, where all configurations and processes are managed in one place. It’s popular with teams that have similar workflows across multiple projects. Projects like Python, Blender, and LLVM use Buildbot to handle builds efficiently. Its centralized setup makes it easy to implement global changes, such as adding new tools or updating validation rules, with minimal disruption across all projects.

However, this centralized control comes with a trade-off: Substantial maintenance effort. You’ll likely need a dedicated administrator – especially as projects grow. Buildbot lacks a user-friendly interface, so you need to edit Python scripts and config files to make changes. And, for teams working with external clients or diverse user groups, it doesn’t separate users or projects into clean access groups.

Still, if you’ve got many similar projects with shared workflows and dependencies that need deep customization, Buildbot is an excellent choice, particularly for teams that have the resources to maintain it.

Jenkins: Flexible and developer friendly

Jenkins takes a different approach. It’s also an on-prem solution but with a more distributed approach to CI workflows. Unlike Buildbot, Jenkins allows teams to manage CI configurations, including builds and workflows, right in their own project repositories. This decentralized design makes it a strong fit for teams with diverse projects, tools, or languages that want to customize builds on a per-project basis.

Jenkins is relatively easy to set up and use, thanks to its web-based interface for managing builds and configurations and its plug-in ecosystem that covers many common use cases. That said, this flexibility comes at a cost: Making global changes across projects can be more difficult in a decentralized setup, and certain customizations require Groovy scripting, which is less straightforward than Python.

Jenkins shines in environments with many unique workflows and tools, and its SaaS-like features, such as user and project management, make it a good choice for multi-client or collaborative teams. While a dedicated administrator isn’t always necessary for basic use cases, scaling and complex configurations benefit from having someone knowledgeable in Jenkins at the helm.

GitHub Actions: Cloud and easy

GitHub Actions (GHA) is a cloud-based CI/CD solution tightly integrated into the GitHub platform. Designed for simplicity, GHA provides pre-configured environments and scripts for common CI/CD tasks, making it easy for teams to get started. GHA is especially great for open-source projects, because it’s free for public repositories and requires no infrastructure maintenance.

However, the platform is not without its limitations. Since GHA is tied exclusively to GitHub, it’s a no-go if you’re not on GitHub. And for private repositories, you’ll have to pay once you use up your free minutes, making it less appealing for budget-conscious projects. It’s also not as flexible as Jenkins or Buildbot for teams that need heavy customization or an on-prem solution.

GHA is best for open-source teams or small projects already using GitHub. It’s also an excellent option for CI/CD beginners who want a streamlined, maintenance-free solution. For private projects with complex needs or teams that need platform flexibility, other tools like Buildbot or Jenkins might be a better fit.

CI helpers: CMake presets and pre-commit

Even with a good CI/CD system, there are a couple of tools I’d recommend to make life easier. Helper tools like CMake Presets and pre-commit can significantly streamline workflows, particularly for desktop and embedded development.

CMake Presets is an extension of the popular CMake build tool that simplifies managing multiple build configurations. By letting you define specific presets for tasks such as local-development or CI builds, CMake Presets cleanly separates these processes, reducing complexity in large projects where environments and dependencies are shared across different workflows.

Similarly, pre-commit is a framework for managing Git pre-commit hooks, and it’s a game-changer for catching issues early. You can use it to run static analysis, enforce code formatting, and check for common errors before any files are committed. And because it runs locally, it reduces the load on your CI systems and gives developers quick feedback, improving code quality and speeding up reviews.

So, which tool is best for you?

The best CI/CD solution depends on your team’s needs and workflow complexity. Buildbot is great if you’ve got a lot of similar projects and want full control over your CI pipeline. Jenkins is better if you’re juggling a mix of projects and need something flexible and easy to manage. And if you’re already on GitHub, GitHub Actions is the fastest way to get up and running.

No matter which tool you choose, pairing it with helpers like CMake Presets and pre-commit can make your workflows even better. At the end of the day, the best CI/CD setup is the one that fits your projects, your team, and the way you like to work.

For a deeper dive into these topics and more advice on setting up your CI/CD pipeline, take a look at our CI/CD Best Practice whitepaper.