CI/CD

Jenkins26.7k★

Jenkins automates builds, tests, and deployments with 1,800+ plugins covering virtually every tool in the software development ecosystem. Jenkins is the original and still the most extensible. It's been around since 2011 and there isn't a workflow it can't handle. MIT licensed. Jenkins runs builds, tests, and deployments using declarative or scripted pipelines defined in Jenkinsfiles. It scales from a single machine to hundreds of build agents. Fully free. No paid tier. CloudBees offers a commercial Jenkins distribution, but the community edition is complete. The catch: Jenkins is showing its age. The UI looks like 2012. Configuration is often click-through rather than code-first. Maintaining a Jenkins server means updating plugins constantly (some of which conflict), managing security patches, and dealing with Java memory tuning. Modern alternatives like GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or ArgoCD handle common workflows with less operational burden. Jenkins still wins for complex, custom pipelines that nothing else can express, but if your needs are standard, you're paying an ops tax for flexibility you don't use.

ArgoCD24.6k★

ArgoCD watches your Git repo and automatically syncs what's deployed in Kubernetes to match what's committed, making Git the single source of truth for your infrastructure. Push a change to Git, ArgoCD deploys it. Someone manually edits the cluster, ArgoCD reverts it. That's GitOps. Apache 2.0, CNCF graduated project. The UI shows you a live dependency graph of every resource in your app, color-coded by sync status. You can see at a glance what's deployed, what's out of sync, and what's degraded. Fully free. No paid tier from the Argo project. Akuity (founded by Argo creators) offers a managed version starting at $0 for small clusters, scaling with usage. ArgoCD handles multi-cluster deployments, Helm charts, Kustomize overlays, plain YAML, and Jsonnet. RBAC is built in. SSO works via OIDC/SAML. The catch: ArgoCD itself needs to run somewhere, and it's not lightweight. The controller, server, repo server, and Redis consume real resources. Initial setup for a production-grade deployment (HA mode, SSO, RBAC policies) takes days, not hours. And the application-of-applications pattern for managing many apps has a learning curve.

Dagger16.6k★

Dagger is CI you can run on your laptop. Write build and test steps as code, or install an official module for Go, pytest, ESLint or Playwright, and the same checks run locally, on your server, or in Dagger Cloud. The engine is Apache 2.0 and free. Version 1.0 hit beta on October 23, 2026, repositioned as full CI built for coding agents. Locally it's a brew install plus Docker. Team self-hosting is real work: shared engines on big persistent disks (the docs push a Helm chart), and GitHub Actions or GitLab CI still starts the jobs. The engine's TCP port has no authentication, so keep it private. Dagger Cloud is the paid part: managed engines, shared cache, traces, and Cloud Checks that run on every GitHub push with no workflow file. It bills usage against a monthly minimum: $20 for one user, $200 for unlimited users. No free Cloud tier, just a trial. Solo: free engine. Small teams: self-host one engine, or Scale. Larger teams: Enterprise for SSO. The catch: 1.0 is a beta with breaking CLI changes, and the hosted CI pitch is days old. A GitHub Actions setup that already works rarely justifies the move.

Woodpecker8.1k★

Woodpecker is a self-hosted CI engine that's dead simple to set up. It's a community fork of Drone CI, after Drone went commercial. Apache 2.0, Go. The YAML pipeline syntax is nearly identical to Drone's. Docker-based execution means each step runs in an isolated container. Supports GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, Forgejo, and Bitbucket. Multi-platform: Linux, ARM, Windows agents. Fully free. No paid tier, no premium features, no hosted offering. Everything (parallel pipelines, matrix builds, secrets management, cron jobs) is included. Self-hosting is straightforward. One server + one or more agents. A small VPS ($5-10/mo) handles most projects. Docker Compose gets you running in under 15 minutes. The ops burden is light. It's a Go binary, not a Java monstrosity. Solo to small teams: perfect. You get unlimited CI minutes for the cost of a cheap VPS. Medium teams: works well with multiple agents for parallel builds. Large teams: possible, but you'll miss the plugin ecosystem and enterprise features that Jenkins or GitLab CI offer. The catch: the plugin ecosystem is smaller than Drone's was, and vastly smaller than GitHub Actions or GitLab CI. If you need a niche integration, you might be writing your own. And the community, while active, is small. Fewer tutorials and Stack Overflow answers.

zadig3.3k★

Zadig is a self-hosted DevOps platform from KodeRover, a Shanghai company, for building, testing and deploying dozens of microservices on Kubernetes. It runs the whole product in parallel instead of one pipeline per service, and spins up isolated test environments per developer. The Basic Free Edition covers workflows, test environments, code scanning and RBAC. You need a Kubernetes cluster: the docs recommend 8 CPU cores and 16GB of RAM, and Zadig itself takes 4 cores and 8GB. The Helm chart can bundle MinIO, whose community repo was archived in April 2026, so use external storage. The paywall sits on production. Production environments, canary and blue-green releases, LDAP login and audit logs need Expert Edition at ¥119 (about $18) per person per month. The advertised AI agents are Enterprise only, quote on request. Solo and small teams: free for test environments, pay to ship to prod. Larger teams: Enterprise. The catch: the README says Apache 2.0, but the LICENSE adds conditions. Selling or embedding it needs KodeRover's permission, multi-tenant SaaS is banned, and contributors agree the license can change. That's source-available. Approvals are built around Feishu, DingTalk and WeCom; most Western teams will fit GitHub Actions or Argo CD better.

doco-cd1.8k★

Doco-CD is GitOps for Docker Compose. Point it at a Git repo containing your docker-compose.yml, and it automatically deploys when you push. Webhooks or polling, your choice. ArgoCD stripped down to just Docker Compose, without the Kubernetes complexity. Runs as a single container with minimal RAM. Supports multiple Git providers, external secret management with SOPS encryption, Prometheus metrics for monitoring deployments, and built-in notifications. Also works with Docker Swarm stacks if you have graduated past single-host Compose. Solo developers and small teams running Docker Compose in production (and there are more of you than the Kubernetes crowd admits): this gives you automated deployments without learning Kubernetes, Helm, or ArgoCD. Push to main, services update. The catch: if you need canary deployments, rolling updates with health checks, or multi-cluster orchestration, you have outgrown this tool. It does one thing and does it well.