GitHub vs. Jenkins

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
GitHub
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
GitHub is a platform that hosts public and private code and provides software development and collaboration tools. Features include version control, issue tracking, code review, team management, syntax highlighting, etc. Personal plans ($0-50), Organizational plans ($0-200), and Enterprise plans are available.
$4
per month per user
Jenkins
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Jenkins is an open source automation server. Jenkins provides hundreds of plugins to support building, deploying and automating any project. As an extensible automation server, Jenkins can be used as a simple CI server or turned into a continuous delivery hub for any project.N/A
Pricing
GitHubJenkins
Editions & Modules
Team
$40
per year per user
Enterprise
$210
per year per user
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GitHubJenkins
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GitHubJenkins
Considered Both Products
GitHub
Chose GitHub
Microsoft Team Foundation Server was too heavy and too complex for fast dvelopment. The integration with opensource build solutions (i.e jenkins) was not explored but the main feedback on this tool was its complexity.
CVS and SVN used to be standards in past years and fit …
Chose GitHub
  • So the far the best UI representation of code which helps the team co-ordinate easier.
  • Easy to explore other projects in an organization and also view a developers performance and history of code writtern in a year.
  • An issue that can be created as part of the GitHub Repo instead …
Chose GitHub
Bitbucket supports Mercurial VCS in addition to Git. Since it is an Atlassian product, Bitbucket is very well integrated with the company's other tools, like JIRA (which is widely used in the development industry), Jenkins, and Bamboo. It offers many of the same features as …
Chose GitHub
An integrated issue tracker right within your project.
Milestones and labels within projects.
Branch comparison views
Chose GitHub
Github is far superior to Svn source control. The speed is a big plus for large projects.
Chose GitHub
Bitbucket has an interface that is much uglier and much more confusing to use. The learning curve is therefore much greater with Bitbucket. However, Bitbucket allows for free private repositories for small teams, which is a huge plus, and if your team is small enough, that …
Jenkins
Chose Jenkins
GitLab CI and GitHub Actions are other powerful options in the market also with a rising popularity and high interoperability with their respective platform.
But Jenkins is still a good option for complex pipelines that require scripting and logic. Also, Jenkins uses as runtime …
Chose Jenkins
Jenkins is highly customizable and flexible, supporting a wide range of plugins and integrations. Jenkins works with any version control system (Git, Subversion, etc.). Jenkins has a more mature ecosystem, and it may be better for large-scale, complex environments, especially …
Chose Jenkins
It's mostly stable and well-known within the DevOps community.
Chose Jenkins
Both Jenkins and TeamCity do a good job of automating CI/CD. Jenkins runs much leaner than TeamCity - it only needs about a Gig of free memory, whereas TeamCity needs a fat 4 Gig free. Many tasks in Jenkins yml config can be very cumbersome, especially running local and …
Chose Jenkins
Jenkins is the only solution that we've tried that just automatically generates builds.
Chose Jenkins
I don't have any experience with alternatives to Jenkins.
Chose Jenkins
Jenkins has been my favorite continuous integration tool I've used. It's easy to setup, intuitive to use, and very powerful. The software allows for building complex workflows, then having them run without thinking about it. This leads to savings in time and resources, and to …
Chose Jenkins
When looking for alternatives for Jenkins we found CircleCI and TeamCity are good too. Jenkins was considered for reasons like it has a wide variety of plugins which integrate well with any kind of system. And its ease of use.

One of the other greater advantage is it is open …
Chose Jenkins
I had experienced some outages and bugs with CircleCI which can be very frustrating since you don't have control over the software.
Chose Jenkins
TeamCity is another viable option for Continuous Integration/Development. We picked Jenkins in this case because there was a lot of support for Amazon CloudFormation and other AWS integrations which fit the task at hand. For just straight compiling Microsoft based builds, TeamCi…
Chose Jenkins
Jenkins immense flexibility and its large and impressive selection of available community-driven plugins makes it ideal choice for solving non-traditional problems.

However, for CI/CD - consider the benefit of modern tools that enforce reusable, infrastructure as code design …
Chose Jenkins
Travis CI and AppVeyor are good services that provide rudimentary support for builds, but they focus on Linux/OSX and Windows respectively, meaning that cross-platform builds will need to use both services. They are free for open source projects on GitHub, so they are seen …
Chose Jenkins
Jenkins provides bare metal framework that people would be able to use and transform to their needs. In a lot of other cases, there are lot of configurations already available which make the softwares heavy ended and less customizable. Also, there are a lot of open source …
Chose Jenkins
Jenkins is ideal for developing software with high-security demands. It is hosted and set up locally and has no outside connections. But these pros could become cons when you work on open source projects and need to waste time for initial setup and maintenance over a project's …
Chose Jenkins
I have not evaluated any other solutions as I was just a user.
Features
GitHubJenkins
Version Control Software Features
Comparison of Version Control Software Features features of Product A and Product B
GitHub
8.8
7 Ratings
6% above category average
Jenkins
-
Ratings
Branching and Merging9.37 Ratings00 Ratings
Version History9.27 Ratings00 Ratings
Version Control Collaboration Tools9.16 Ratings00 Ratings
Pull Requests9.57 Ratings00 Ratings
Code Review Tools8.46 Ratings00 Ratings
Project Access Control7.97 Ratings00 Ratings
Automated Testing Integration8.17 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue Tracking Integration8.17 Ratings00 Ratings
Branch Protection9.46 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
GitHubJenkins
Small Businesses
Git
Git
Score 10.0 out of 10
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Git
Git
Score 10.0 out of 10
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.6 out of 10
Enterprises
Perforce Helix Core
Perforce Helix Core
Score 6.5 out of 10
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GitHubJenkins
Likelihood to Recommend
8.9
(128 ratings)
7.3
(74 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.3
(7 ratings)
6.6
(8 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.9
(6 ratings)
Support Rating
8.8
(26 ratings)
6.6
(6 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
6.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
GitHubJenkins
Likelihood to Recommend
GitHub
GitHub is an easy to go tool when it comes to Version Controlling, CI/CD workflows, Integration with third party softwares. It's effective for any level of CI/CD implementation you would like to. Also the the cost of product is also very competitive and affordable. As of now GitHub lacks capabilities when it comes to detailed project management in comparison to tools like Jira, but overall its value for money.
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Open Source
Jenkins is a highly customizable CI/CD tool with excellent community support. One can use Jenkins to build and deploy monolith services to microservices with ease. It can handle multiple "builds" per agent simultaneously, but the process can be resource hungry, and you need some impressive specs server for that. With Jenkins, you can automate almost any task. Also, as it is an open source, we can save a load of money by not spending on enterprise CI/CD tools.
Read full review
Pros
GitHub
  • Version control: GitHub provides a powerful and flexible Git-based version control system that allows teams to track changes to their code over time, collaborate on code with others, and maintain a history of their work.
  • Code review: GitHub's pull request system enables teams to review code changes, discuss suggestions and merge changes in a central location. This makes it easier to catch bugs and ensure that code quality remains high.
  • Collaboration: GitHub provides a variety of collaboration tools to help teams work together effectively, including issue tracking, project management, and wikis.
Read full review
Open Source
  • Automated Builds: Jenkins is configured to monitor the version control system for new pull requests. Once a pull request is created, Jenkins automatically triggers a build process. It checks out the code, compiles it, and performs any necessary build steps specified in the configuration.
  • Unit Testing: Jenkins runs the suite of unit tests defined for the project. These tests verify the functionality of individual components and catch any regressions or errors. If any unit tests fail, Jenkins marks the build as unsuccessful, and the developer is notified to fix the issues.
  • Code Analysis: Jenkins integrates with code analysis tools like SonarQube or Checkstyle. It analyzes the code for quality, adherence to coding standards, and potential bugs or vulnerabilities. The results are reported back to the developer and the product review team for further inspection.
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Cons
GitHub
  • Not an easy tool for beginners. Prior command-line experience is expected to get started with GitHub efficiently.
  • Unlike other source control platforms GitHub is a little confusing. With no proper GUI tool its hard to understand the source code version/history.
  • Working with larger files can be tricky. For file sizes above 100MB, GitHub expects the developer to use different commands (lfs).
  • While using the web version of GitHub, it has some restrictions on the number of files that can be uploaded at once. Recommended action is to use the command-line utility to add and push files into the repository.
Read full review
Open Source
  • The UI could be slightly better, it feels kind of like the 90s, but it works well.
  • An easier way to filter jobs other than views on the dashboard.
  • An easier way to read the console logs when tests do fail.
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Likelihood to Renew
GitHub
GitHub's ease of use and continued investment into the Developer Experience have made it the de facto tool for our engineers to manage software changes. With new features that continue to come out, we have been able to consolidate several other SaaS solutions and reduce the number of tools required for each engineer to perform their job responsibilities.
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Open Source
We have a certain buy-in as we have made a lot of integrations and useful tools around jenkins, so it would cost us quite some time to change to another tool. Besides that, it is very versatile, and once you have things set up, it feels unnecessary to change tool. It is also a plus that it is open source.
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Usability
GitHub
GitHub is the premiere tool 'sfor version control across all organizations. While there are other similar tools available from various vendors. GitHub implementation is superior to them all making all aspects of version control significantly easier to manage vs other solutions. Team management, billing, user restrictions, issue management, code reviews, documentation all available in a central location.
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Open Source
Jenkins streamlines development and provides end to end automated integration and deployment. It even supports Docker and Kubernetes using which container instances can be managed effectively. It is easy to add documentation and apply role based access to files and services using Jenkins giving full control to the users. Any deviation can be easily tracked using the audit logs.
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Performance
GitHub
No answers on this topic
Open Source
No, when we integrated this with GitHub, it becomes more easy and smart to manage and control our workforce. Our distributed workforce is now streamlined to a single bucket. All of our codes and production outputs are now automatically synced with all the workers. There are many cases when our in-house team makes changes in the release, our remote workers make another release with other environment variables. So it is better to get all of the work in control.
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Support Rating
GitHub
There are a ton of resources and tutorials for GitHub online. The sheer number of people who use GitHub ensures that someone has the exact answer you are looking for. The docs on GitHub itself are very thorough as well. You will often find an official doc along with the hundreds of independent tutorials that answers your question, which is unusual for most online services.
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Open Source
As with all open source solutions, the support can be minimal and the information that you can find online can at times be misleading. Support may be one of the only real downsides to the overall software package. The user community can be helpful and is needed as the product is not the most user-friendly thing we have used.
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Implementation Rating
GitHub
No answers on this topic
Open Source
It is worth well the time to setup Jenkins in a docker container. It is also well worth to take the time to move any "Jenkins configuration" into Jenkinsfiles and not take shortcuts.
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Alternatives Considered
GitHub
While I don't have very much experience with these 2 solutions, they're two of the most popular alternatives to GitHub. Bitbucket is from Atlassian, which may make sense for a team that is already using other Atlassian tools like Jira, Confluence, and Trello, as their integration will likely be much tighter. Gitlab on the other hand has a reputation as a very capable GitHub replacement with some features that are not available on GitHub like firewall tools.
Read full review
Open Source
Overall, Jenkins is the easiest platform for someone who has no experience to come in and use effectively. We can get a junior engineer into Jenkins, give them access, and point them in the right direction with minimal hand-holding. The competing products I have used (TravisCI/GitLab/Azure) provide other options but can obfuscate the process due to the lack of straightforward simplicity. In other areas (capability, power, customization), Jenkins keeps up with the competition and, in some areas, like customization, exceeds others.
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Return on Investment
GitHub
  • Team collaboration significantly improved as everything is clearly logged and maintained.
  • Maintaining a good overview of items will be delivered wrt the roadmap for example.
  • Knowledge management and tracking. Over time a lot of tickets, issues and comments are logged. GitHub is a great asset to go back and review why x was y.
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Open Source
  • Faster Time-to-Market: Jenkins automate the build, testing, and deployment process, enabling faster feedback and continuous improvement.
  • Improved Quality: Jenkins automatically run unit tests and integration tests, ensuring that code changes meet the necessary quality standards.
  • Cost Savings: Jenkins is an open-source tool that is free to use
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ScreenShots