Cheapest platform as CI minutes grow
Team size and machine size held at your current input β only monthly CI minutes change per row. Watch GitHub's and CircleCI's usage meters climb while Buildkite (self-hosted) stays flat.
| CI minutes/mo | GitHub Actions | CircleCI | Buildkite | Cheapest |
|---|
Three different billing primitives for the same CI minute
GitHub Actions bundles CI into the GitHub Team seat you're likely already paying for ($4/user/month, 3,000 org-wide minutes included), then bills a flat $0.006/minute for any Linux minutes beyond that on standard 2-core hosted runners -- simple, predictable, and cheap at the seat level regardless of team size. CircleCI instead prices a $15/month Performance base covering 5 users and 30,000 credits, then meters both extra seats ($15 each beyond 5) and extra credits -- and credits burn faster the bigger the machine: 5 credits/minute on Small, 10 on Medium, 20 on Large, so the exact same job costs 4x as many credits on a Large box as a Small one. Buildkite flips the model entirely: a $30/user/month seat is expensive relative to GitHub's $4, but that seat fee covers unlimited builds on self-hosted agents -- runners you install on your own infrastructure -- so CI volume itself costs nothing extra. Only if you opt into Buildkite's own hosted compute add-on (billed per vCPU-minute, e.g. $0.016/min on a 4-vCPU Medium machine) does Buildkite start behaving like a usage-metered vendor too.
The practical result: a large team running light, bursty CI (lots of seats, modest minutes) tends to land cheapest on GitHub Actions, since its $4 seat undercuts both competitors before any usage is counted. A small team running enormous CI volume on its own hardware -- monorepo test suites, nightly rebuilds, heavy matrix builds -- can land dramatically cheaper on Buildkite's self-hosted mode, since GitHub's and CircleCI's per-minute and per-credit meters never stop climbing while Buildkite's bill stays pinned to seat count. CircleCI tends to sit in between, favored by teams that want managed hosted compute without GitHub's ecosystem lock-in but don't want to run their own runners like Buildkite's default mode assumes. There's no universal winner -- run your own team size, CI minutes and machine size through the calculator above.
How this calculator works
The GitHub Actions vs CircleCI vs Buildkite Cost Calculator compares three CI/CD pricing shapes at your team size, monthly Linux CI minutes, and machine/resource-class size. GitHub Actions cost is seats Γ $4 (GitHub Team) plus max(0, minutes β 3000) Γ $0.006 for minutes beyond the org-wide included allowance, using the standard 2-core Linux runner rate. CircleCI converts your minutes into credits using the selected resource class (5/10/20 credits per minute for Small/Medium/Large), and if a 5-seat, β€30,000-credit team fits the Free plan it shows $0; otherwise it charges the $15 Performance base (5 seats, 30,000 credits included) plus $15 per 25,000 extra credits plus $15 per extra seat beyond 5. Buildkite defaults to self-hosted agents: seats Γ $30 flat, with CI volume costing nothing extra since you supply the runners. Checking "use hosted compute" switches Buildkite to seats Γ $30 + max(0, minutesΓvCPU β 4000) Γ $0.004, billing its own hosted runners per vCPU-minute (2/4/8 vCPU for Small/Medium/Large) instead.
These are representative pricing shapes based on each vendor's published self-serve rates as of August 2026 β GitHub Team seat price and Actions per-minute runner rates from github.com/pricing and docs.github.com/en/billing/concepts/product-billing/github-actions; CircleCI Free/Performance plan pricing and per-25,000-credit rate from circleci.com/pricing, and per-resource-class credit consumption from CircleCI's own "How many credits does each executor use?" support article; Buildkite Free/Pro seat pricing, included self-hosted agents/hosted vCPU-minutes, and hosted-compute per-vCPU-minute rate from buildkite.com/pricing. Real bills also depend on annual vs monthly billing discounts, Windows/macOS/GPU/ARM runner classes (priced higher than the standard Linux rate modeled here), storage overage, and negotiated enterprise contracts β confirm exact current pricing directly with each vendor before budgeting a migration.
Frequently asked questions
Which is cheaper, GitHub Actions, CircleCI, or Buildkite?
It depends on your team size and how much CI compute you actually burn, because the three bill on fundamentally different primitives. GitHub Actions charges a low $4/user/month GitHub Team seat plus a flat per-minute overage once you exceed the bundled org-wide minutes (about $0.006/minute on standard Linux runners). CircleCI charges a $15/month Performance-plan base covering 5 users and 30,000 credits, then meters both extra credits (consumed faster on bigger resource classes) and extra seats beyond 5 at $15 each. Buildkite charges $30 per active user/month, which is a much higher seat price than GitHub's $4 β but if you run Buildkite's default self-hosted agents (your own runners), CI minutes cost nothing beyond that seat fee, so a small team running huge CI volume on its own hardware can end up far cheaper on Buildkite than paying GitHub or CircleCI's usage meters. A large team running light CI volume usually lands cheapest on GitHub Actions since its $4 seat price undercuts both competitors before any usage is even counted. Run your own team size and monthly CI minutes through the calculator above.
Why does Buildkite charge so much more per seat than GitHub Actions?
Buildkite's $30/user/month Pro seat isn't paying for compute at all in the default configuration β it's paying for the orchestration, UI, permissions, and pipeline-as-code control plane, while the actual build compute runs on agents you install on your own servers or cloud instances, per Buildkite's own pricing and self-hosted-agent documentation. That means once you've paid the seat fee, running one build or ten thousand builds a month costs Buildkite the same $0 in usage charges, because Buildkite never sees or bills for the compute itself. GitHub Actions and CircleCI both take the opposite approach for their default hosted runners: a low or bundled seat/base fee, but every minute of compute you consume on their infrastructure is metered and billed, whether per-minute (GitHub) or per-credit scaled by machine size (CircleCI). Buildkite does also sell its own hosted compute as an add-on billed per vCPU-minute for teams that don't want to manage runners, which this calculator supports as a toggle, but that add-on is priced closer to the other two vendors' usage-metered model.
How does CircleCI's credit system actually convert to a dollar cost?
CircleCI doesn't bill per minute directly β it bills per credit, and how many credits a minute costs depends entirely on which resource class (machine size) you run the job on, per CircleCI's own executor-credit documentation. A Linux Docker "small" job burns 5 credits per minute, "medium" burns 10, "large" burns 20, and "xlarge" burns 40 β so the exact same one-hour job costs 4x as many credits on an xlarge machine as it does on a small one. The Performance plan includes 30,000 credits per month in its $15 base fee and sells additional credits at $15 per 25,000 (about $0.0006/credit), which works out to roughly $0.006/minute on a medium machine but roughly $0.024/minute on an xlarge machine. That resource-class multiplier is the key difference from GitHub Actions, whose standard hosted runners bill a flat per-minute rate that doesn't scale with a selectable machine-size tier the way CircleCI's does.
Does this calculator account for GitHub's larger runners or CircleCI's macOS/GPU classes?
No β this calculator intentionally models the common case: GitHub's standard 2-core Linux hosted runner (~$0.006/minute), CircleCI's Linux Docker resource classes (small/medium/large), and Buildkite's Linux vCPU-based hosted compute or free self-hosted agents. All three vendors also sell larger, GPU, ARM, or macOS runner tiers at meaningfully higher per-minute or per-credit rates that aren't reflected here, and GitHub's per-minute rate roughly doubles or more for Windows and increases further for macOS runners. If your pipeline runs mostly on non-standard runner classes, treat this calculator's numbers as a floor and check each vendor's own runner-class pricing page before budgeting a real migration.