CI/CD Cost Calculator

Updated 27 March 2026

Compare monthly CI/CD pipeline costs across 6 platforms. Enter your usage below to see a side-by-side breakdown.

GitHub ActionsGitLab CICircleCIBitbucket PipelinesAzure DevOpsJenkins

Your Pipeline Usage

Monthly build minutes: 12,000 mins

Monthly Cost Comparison

Sorted lowest to highest
Bitbucket PipelinesCheapest
Premium plan ($90) + 8,500 extra mins ($43)
3,500 free minutes/month per account
$133
/ month
Tightly integrated with Jira. Best value for small Atlassian-stack teams.
GitHub Actions
Team plan ($60) + 9,000 billable mins ($72) + storage ($2)
3,000 free Linux minutes/month on Team
$134
/ month
Linux runners. macOS costs 10x more. Self-hosted runners are free.
CircleCI
Performance plan ($225) + 90,000 credits ($54)
30,000 free credits/month on Performance
$279
/ month
Medium resource class. Large/xlarge machines cost proportionally more.
GitLab CI
Premium plan ($435) + 2,000 extra mins ($10) + storage ($0)
10,000 CI minutes/month on Premium
$445
/ month
Premium tier. Self-hosted runners available at no compute cost.
Azure DevOps
Basic plan ($60) + 10 parallel jobs ($400)
1 free parallel job + 1,800 mins/month for public repos
$460
/ month
Parallel jobs include unlimited minutes. Best value for large Windows/.NET builds.
Jenkins (self-hosted)
11 VMs ($550) + maintenance estimate ($750)
Software is open source. All costs are infrastructure.
$1,300
/ month
Infrastructure costs only. Does not include staff time for setup/maintenance.

Estimates based on public pricing as of March 2026. Verify current rates before purchasing.

More CI/CD Resources

Platform Comparison

Side-by-side feature comparison across all 6 platforms. Limits, free tiers, and ecosystem fit.

Optimize Costs

Practical techniques to reduce CI/CD spend: caching, parallelism, and self-hosted runner strategies.

Migrate Platforms

Cost and effort guide for migrating between CI/CD platforms. What to expect and how to plan.

Frequently Asked Questions

How accurate are these CI/CD cost estimates?

Estimates are based on publicly published pricing as of March 2026 and represent typical usage patterns. Actual costs can vary based on resource class, region, enterprise agreements, and usage patterns not captured here. Always verify with the platform before committing.

Why does Jenkins show as so cheap?

Jenkins software is open source with no per-seat or per-minute fees. Our estimate covers infrastructure costs (VMs) and a maintenance allowance. The real cost of Jenkins includes significant DevOps engineer time for setup, plugin management, and ongoing maintenance, which is hard to quantify without knowing your team.

What does concurrent jobs mean?

Concurrent jobs is the number of pipeline runs that can execute simultaneously. Higher concurrency reduces wait time in busy pipelines but increases cost on platforms that charge per parallel job (like Azure DevOps). GitHub Actions and GitLab CI typically handle concurrency through runner pools.

Are storage costs included?

Storage costs are included where they are billed separately (primarily GitHub Actions artifacts). Most platforms include a storage allowance in their base plan. The calculator uses 10GB as the storage input by default.

Does this include macOS or Windows runners?

No. The calculator uses Linux runner pricing throughout, which is the cheapest option on all platforms. macOS runners typically cost 10x more (GitHub Actions) and Windows runners cost 2x more. Adjust your expectations accordingly if you need non-Linux builds.

When should I choose self-hosted runners?

Self-hosted runners make sense when your builds run for many minutes per day (reducing per-minute fees to infrastructure costs), when you need access to specific hardware or networks, or when compliance requirements prevent use of cloud runners. The break-even point versus GitHub Actions is typically around 50,000 build minutes per month.