CloudBees 21,188 , founded in 2010 by Sacha Labourey and François Dechery, absorbed InfraDNA on 9 November 2010 and became the Jenkins 8,793 company in the way Red Hat is a Linux company: it employs many core and Pipeline maintainers, funded much of the Pipeline work behind Jenkins 2.0, and sells CloudBees CI, built on the open-source core. Kawaguchi left in January 2020 to found Launchable, which CloudBees bought in August 2024.
| Jenkins | CloudBees CI | |
|---|---|---|
| License and price | MIT, free | Subscription, quote-priced |
| Many controllers | Each managed alone | Operations Center manages them centrally |
| High availability | One active controller | Active-active controllers |
| Plugins and support | Any of 2,000+; community forums | A tested plugin set; vendor SLAs |
The rest of the ecosystem lives in the update center, the signed JSON catalog every controller installs plugins from. Its popularity field counts the controllers reporting each plugin through anonymous usage statistics:
curl -sL -o uc.json "https://updates.jenkins.io/update-center.actual.json?version=2.568.3"
jq '.plugins | length' uc.json
jq -r '.plugins[] | "\(.popularity) \(.name)"' uc.json | sort -rn | head -32112 257790 script-security 257756 structs 257599 bouncycastle-api
The top of the list is libraries nearly every plugin depends on, so a flaw in one reaches about a quarter of a million controllers (Patching Plugins).