CloudBees 21,188 (CloudBees) sells two layers above open-source Jenkins 8,793 , both priced by quote. CloudBees CI is Jenkins with the operations a large company needs: many controllers managed from one Operations Center, a tested set of plugins, high availability and vendor support. CloudBees Unify is a control plane over several CI tools at once, Jenkins, GitHub Actions 29 and others, applying common security and compliance policies and orchestrating releases. CloudBees CI runs the same Jenkinsfiles and plugins, so moving to it from open-source Jenkins is a deployment change, not a rewrite.
| Tool | License | Hosting | Price in September 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jenkins | MIT | Self-hosted | Free |
| Woodpecker CI 438,520 | Apache-2.0 | Self-hosted | Free |
| Tekton 551,465 , Argo Workflows 126 | Apache-2.0 | Your Kubernetes 5,150 | Free |
| GitLab CI/CD 377 | Open core (MIT) | Hosted or self-hosted | Free tier; Premium $29/user/month |
| CircleCI 10,326 | Proprietary | Hosted, own runners | Free tier; from $15/month |
| Buildkite 4,678 | Proprietary, MIT agent | Hosted control, own agents | Free tier; $30/active user/month |
| TeamCity 856 | Proprietary | Self-hosted or cloud | Free for 3 agents; $2,399/year |
| CloudBees CI | Proprietary, on Jenkins | Self-hosted | Quote |
Open source buys freedom and cost control and charges in engineering time; commercial products buy that time back with money and some lock-in. For BookNest, a small team already on GitHub 29 , Actions (GitHub) is the default. Jenkins earns its keep when builds must stay on your own network, need hardware no hosted runner offers, or depend on its plugins; CloudBees earns its fee when dozens of Jenkins controllers need one owner.