CircleCI vs GitHub Actions vs Buildkite: CI/CD pricing once you're past the free minutes

GitHub Actions now charges $0.006 per Linux minute — the same rate CircleCI's usage-based pricing lands on. So for a small team, the "which CI is cheaper" question mostly answers itself before you even open a pricing page: GitHub Actions' Team plan includes 3,000 free minutes a month, which covers most small teams outright, and it's the obvious default if your code already lives on GitHub. Open-source repos get unlimited public-repo minutes for free, full stop.

CircleCI's Performance tier starts at $15/month with a 30,000-credit org-wide pool and real parallelism, which is the more generous free-tier story of the two once you're past the smallest projects — 30,000 credits goes further than it sounds.

Buildkite is the odd one out architecturally, and it's worth understanding why before comparing numbers directly: the control plane is hosted by Buildkite, but **every build runs on infrastructure you own** — your own servers, your own cloud account, your own agents. Pro is $30/user/month for that hosted-orchestration-plus-your-hardware model, and the free plan gives unlimited self-hosted agents.

| | Pricing shape | Free tier |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub Actions | $0.006/Linux min | 3,000 min/mo (unlimited on public repos) |
| CircleCI | credit-based, $15/mo entry | 30,000 credits/mo |
| Buildkite | $30/user/mo, your own compute | unlimited self-hosted agents |

Where this flips: past roughly 100,000 build minutes a month, the per-minute platforms (GitHub Actions, CircleCI) start costing noticeably more than Buildkite or a self-hosted Jenkins setup, because you're now paying a vendor markup on compute you could be running yourself at cost. Below that volume, the convenience of not managing agents is worth the premium for almost every team.

Start on GitHub Actions if you're already there — it's free enough for a long time. Move to CircleCI if you need parallelism GitHub can't give you at a price you can predict. Only look at Buildkite once your build minutes are genuinely high volume and you have the ops capacity to run your own agents.