Skip to content
Z Zendikt
J
CI/CD Platforms · Rank #4 of 10

Jenkins

Open-source CI/CD leader for self-hosted and regulated industries.

By Jenkins (CDF / open-source community) · Founded 2011 · Distributed (Continuous Delivery Foundation) · private

Jenkins is the open-source CI/CD leader, forked from Hudson 2011 and governed by the Continuous Delivery Foundation. The product is the most-deployed self-hosted CI/CD platform globally. Strengths: open-source flexibility (MIT license), self-hosted control for regulated industries, largest plugin ecosystem (1,800+ plugins), strong fit for migrating-from-Jenkins-too-expensive-to-not, mature 14-year track record. Best fit for regulated industries and self-hosted-anchored organizations. Trade-offs: aging architecture (Groovy DSL pipelines, plugin sprawl), declining mindshare as modern teams migrate to GitHub Actions / GitLab CI/CD, customer reports of plugin maintenance burden, and security vulnerabilities historically exploited.

Visit Jenkins Vendor pricing Compare to CircleCI
Best for

Regulated industries (defense, healthcare, financial services) and self-hosted-anchored organizations needing CI/CD without commercial license, particularly large legacy installations expensive to migrate.

Worst for

Modern teams without legacy Jenkins commitments (GitHub Actions / GitLab CI/CD better), buyers wanting modern UX (CircleCI cleaner), or buyers without Jenkins expertise.

Vendor Trust Score

Is Jenkins a trustworthy vendor?

8.3/10
High trust
Pricing transparency
Published rates; no hidden fees
9.5
Contract fairness
Reasonable terms; no auto-renew traps
9.0
Incident response
How they handle outages and breaches
7.0
Post-acquisition behavior
Customer treatment after M&A or PE
8.5
Executive stability
Leadership churn over 24 months
8.5
Roadmap honesty
Public commitments held
7.5
Trust signal log
  • 2024-09-22
    Open-source Jenkins maintained by CDF; community-governed
  • 2025-04-22
    Customer migration away from Jenkins flagged in industry reports
Vendor Trust is scored independently of product quality. A great product from an unfair vendor still earns a low trust score.
Review Intelligence

What 2,480 reviews actually say

Synthesized from G2, Capterra, Reddit, Trustpilot. Patterns >15% prevalence shown.

Last synthesized
2026-04-29

Praise patterns

  • Open-source flexibility
    87% →
  • Self-hosted control
    78% →
  • Largest plugin ecosystem
    71% →

Complaint patterns

  • Aging architecture
    64% ↑
  • Declining mindshare
    58% ↑
  • Plugin maintenance burden
    51% ↑
Sentiment trend (6 months)
70/100 -1 pts
12
01
02
03
04
05
Patterns are extracted from review corpus and human-verified. We surface trends, not anecdotes.
Verified Pricing

What buyers actually pay

287 anonymized deal disclosures · last updated 2026-05-01

Contribute your deal price
Company size Median annual
Self-hosted (open-source) $0
CloudBees CI (enterprise) $144,000
Verified pricing is crowdsourced from buyers under anonymity guarantees. Vendor-listed prices are validated against actual deals quarterly.
Compliance & Security

Auto-verified certifications

Verified 2026-05-01
SOC 2 Type II
ISO 27001
HIPAA
GDPR
CCPA
PCI DSS
FedRAMP

Editorial: Strengths

  • Open-source (MIT license)
  • Self-hosted control for regulated industries
  • Largest plugin ecosystem (1,800+)
  • Mature 14-year track record
  • Best for on-prem / air-gapped
  • No license cost (self-hosted)

Editorial: Weaknesses

  • Aging architecture (Groovy DSL, plugin sprawl)
  • Declining mindshare
  • Customer reports of plugin maintenance burden
  • Security vulnerabilities historically exploited
  • UX dated relative to modern challengers
  • Implementation requires Jenkins expertise

Key features & integrations

  • +Open-source CI/CD
  • +Largest plugin ecosystem (1,800+)
  • +Self-hosted
  • +Groovy DSL pipelines
  • +Distributed builds
  • +Right call for legacy + regulated
1800+ integrations
Git (any provider)AWSAzureKubernetesMavenGradle
Geography supported
Global
Best fit
50–500,000+ employees · Regulated industries + self-hosted
Editorial deep-dive

Read our full ranking of CI/CD Platforms

Jenkins ranks #4 in our editorial review of 10 ci/cd platforms platforms. The deep-dive covers methodology, comparison tables, decision matrix, migration scoring, and FAQs.

Read the full ranking

Closest alternatives in CI/CD Platforms

#3
CircleCI
Cloud-native standalone CI/CD leader.
★ 4.4 public
#5
Buildkite
Hybrid SaaS UI + self-hosted runners for regulated industries.
★ 4.6 public
#2
GitLab CI/CD
Native CI/CD for GitLab self-managed and SaaS customers.
★ 4.5 public
Help the next buyer

Contribute your verified deal price

Pricing in B2B software is opaque because vendors want it that way. Verified buyer prices fix that, anonymously. Share what you actually paid for Jenkins; we’ll add it to the verified pricing dataset on this page (with company size band only, no identifying details).

Submit anonymously