Product Solutions Resources Partners Pricing Support Talk to an expert Get free trial Login GitLab vs Jenkins Feature maturity comparison against set of industry standards Learn more about our scoring methodology GitLab 91% 15.5 / 17 Features & Capabilities Jenkins 71% 12 / 17 Features & Capabilities Verify 0 17 15.5 0 17 12 Manage 0 15 12 0 15 Plan 0 16 10.5 0 16 Create 0 15 15 0 15 Package 0 13 10.5 0 13 Secure 0 15 14.5 0 15 Release 0 14 13 0 14 Configure 0 7 6 0 7 Monitor 0 12 4 0 12 Protect 0 4 4 0 4 Jenkins Overview Jenkins is one of the most popular self-managed open source build automation and CI/CD developer tools in the world. It derives its incredible flexibility from incorporating capabilities from hundreds of available plugins, enabling it to support building, deploying, and automating any project. It’s important to understand that Jenkins is not the same as CloudBees. CloudBees is the company that primarily maintains Jenkins. The four products used by the Jenkins community are: Jenkins Open Source Jenkins X CloudBees Jenkins Distribution CloudBees Core Jenkins Open Source natively supports application building, artifact packaging, application testing, and pull requests. Extending the native functionality of Jenkins to support Continuous Delivery is done through plugins. Jenkins X is meant to make running a pipeline out of the box with Kubernetes easier. Jenkins X natively integrates Jenkins CI/CD server, Kubernetes, Helm, and other tools to offer a prescriptive CI/CD pipeline with best practices built-in, such as using GitOps to manage environments. It deploys Jenkins into Kubernetes containers to get around the complexities of installing and integrating Jenkins. However, it is a complex pairing of many tools including the fragile Jenkins server. CloudBees Core is a distinct product built on top of open source Jenkins and is a paid tool. CloudBees CI has two components: the Client Master and the Operations Center. The Client Master is a Jenkins master, whose main function is to coordinate the building of projects such as Pipelines. When a CloudBees CI installation consists of two or more Client Masters, it is usually a good idea to install an Operations Center instance to manage these Client Masters. CloudBees Jenkins Distribution is free software that provides developers with a Jenkins environment built on the most recent supported Jenkins release. The distribution comes with a recommended catalog of tested plugins available through the CloudBees Assurance Program. Jenkins v/s GitLab Decision Kit Explore comparisons between GitLab’s and Jenkins CI offering. Review the GitLab vs. Jenkins for Business Decision Makers (BDM) page to understand top points BDMs should consider when comparing GitLab to Jenkins. Evaluate Migrate Licensing etc. GitLab vs Jenkins For Business Decision Makers A brief summary of comparison analysis including Jenkins strengths, limitations, challenges and GitLab’s key differentiators. GitLab vs Jenkins For Technical Decision Makers A brief summary of comparison analysis for Continous Integration, Continous Delivery and Security. Jenkins Gaps What are some of Jenkins’ gaps when considering a DevOps solution? GitLab Differentiators Key GitLab differentiators in Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. Key Questions to Ask Questions to ask when evaluating a DevOps solution. GitLab compared to 3 variants of Jenkins Blog highlighting how GitLab stacks up against 3 variants of Jenkins Feature Comparison FEATURES Built-in CI/CD SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE GitLab has built-in Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery, for free, no need to install it separately. Use it to build, test, and deploy your website (GitLab Pages) or webapp. The job results are displayed on merge requests for easy access. Learn more about CI/CD Application performance monitoring SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE GitLab collects and displays performance metrics for deployed apps, leveraging Prometheus. Developers can determine the impact of a merge and keep an eye on their production systems, without leaving GitLab. Learn more about monitoring deployed apps Application performance alerts SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE GitLab allows engineers to seamlessly create service level indicator alerts and be notified of any desired events, all within the same workflow where they write their code. Learn more about creating SLI alerts GitLab Self-monitoring SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE GitLab comes out of the box enabled for Prometheus monitoring with extensive instrumentation, making it easy to ensure your GitLab deployment is responsive and healthy. Learn more about GitLab self-monitoring Project Level Value Stream Analytics SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE GitLab provides a dashboard that lets teams measure the time it takes to go from planning to monitoring. GitLab can provide this data because it has all the tools built-in: from the idea, to the CI, to code review, to deploy to production. Learn more about Value Stream Analytics Group Level Value Stream Analytics SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE GitLab provides a group dashboard that lets teams measure the time it takes to go from planning to monitoring. GitLab can provide this data because it has all the tools built-in: from the idea, to the CI, to code review, to deploy to production. Learn more about Value Stream Analytics Built-in Container Registry SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE GitLab Container Registry is a secure and private registry for Docker images. It allows for easy upload and download of images from GitLab CI. It is fully integrated with Git repository management. (Codefresh will be ending their support for private docker registries as of May 1, 2020 Documentation on Container Registry Preview your changes with Review Apps SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE With GitLab CI/CD you can create a new environment for each one of your branches, speeding up your development process. Spin up dynamic environments for your merge requests with the ability to preview your branch in a live environment. Review Apps support both static and dynamic URLs. Learn more about Review Apps CI/CD Horizontal Autoscaling SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE GitLab CI/CD cloud native architecture can easily scale horizontally by adding new nodes if the workload increases. GitLab Runners can automatically spin up and down new containers to ensure pipelines are processed immediately and minimize costs. Learn more about GitLab CI/CD Horizontal Autoscaling CI/CD Pipelines Dashboard SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Visualize the history and current status of pipelines across projects and groups all in a single dashboard that can be customized for each user. Learn more about Cross-Project Pipelines in the Operations Dashboard Built for using containers and Docker SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE GitLab ships with its own Container Registry, Docker CI Runner, and is ready for a complete CI/CD container workflow. There is no need to install, configure, or maintain additional plugins. Read the docs Cloud Native SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE GitLab and its CI/CD is Cloud Native, purpose built for the cloud model. GitLab can be easily deployed on Kubernetes and used to deploy your application to Kubernetes with support out of the box. Kubernetes integration Container debugging with an integrated web terminal SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Easily debug your containers in any of your environments using the built-in GitLab Web Terminal. GitLab can open a terminal session directly from your environment if your application is deployed on Kubernetes. This is a very powerful feature where you can quickly debug issues without leaving the comfort of your web browser. Learn more about the web terminal Comprehensive pipeline graphs SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Pipelines can be complex structures with many sequential and parallel jobs. To make it a little easier to see what is going on, you can view a graph of a single pipeline and its status. Learn more about pipeline graphs Browsable artifacts SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE With GitLab CI you can upload your job artifacts in GitLab itself without the need of an external service. Because of this, artifacts are also browsable through GitLab’s web interface. Learn more about using job artifacts in your project Latest artifacts locked to prevent deletion SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE The latest artifact of a successful job and pipeline on any active branch, MR, or tag is automatically locked to prevent being deleted. This makes it possible to set an aggressive expiration policy to clean up older artifacts, reduce disk space consumption, and ensure the latest artifact is always available. This default behavior is configurable at the project level and can be disabled in project settings. Learn more about job artifacts expiration Scheduled triggering of pipelines SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE You can make your pipelines run on a schedule in a cron-like environment. Learn how to trigger pipelines on a schedule in GitLab Code Quality MR Widget SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Code Quality reports are available in the merge request widget area, giving you early insights into how the change will affect the health of your code before deciding if you want to accept it. Learn more about Code Quality Code Quality Reports SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Full Code Quality reports are available on the pipeline page, showing areas of the codebase that do not meet the organization’s preferred style or standards. Learn more about Code Quality reports Code Quality violation notices in MR diffs SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Code Quality violations introduced in a merge request are annotated in the merge request diff view to detail how the code quality could decrease if merged. Learn more about Code Quality in MR diffs Multi-project pipeline graphs SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Visualize how pipelines across projects are linked together, including cross project dependencies. Learn more about multi-project pipeline graphs Protected variables SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE You can mark a variable as “protected” to make it available only to jobs running on protected branches, therefore only authorized users can get access to it. Learn how to use protected variables Environments and deployments SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE GitLab CI is capable of not only testing or building your projects, but also deploying them in your infrastructure, with the added benefit of giving you a way to track your deployments. Environments are like tags for your CI jobs, describing where code gets deployed. Learn more about environments Environments history SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Environments history allows you to see what is currently being deployed on your servers, and to access a detailed view for all the past deployments. From this list you can also re-deploy the current version, or even rollback an old stable one in case something went wrong. Learn more about history of an environment Environment-specific variables SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Limit the environment scope of a variable by defining which environments it can be available for. Learn how to configure environment-specific variables Group-level variables SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Define variables at the group level and use them in any project in the group. Learn how to configure variables Customizable path for CI/CD configuration SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE You can define a custom path into your repository for your CI/CD configuration file. Learn how to configure a custom CI/CD configuration file Run CI/CD jobs on Windows SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE GitLab Runner supports Windows and can run jobs natively on this platform. You can automatically build, test, and deploy Windows-based projects by leveraging PowerShell or batch files. Install GitLab Runner on Windows Run CI/CD jobs on macOS SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE GitLab Runner supports macOS and can run jobs natively on this platform. You can automatically build, test, and deploy for macOS based projects by leveraging shell scripts and command line tools. Install GitLab Runner on macOS Run CI/CD jobs on Linux ARM SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE GitLab Runner supports Linux operating systems on ARM architectures and can run jobs natively on this platform. You can automatically build, test, and deploy for Linux ARM based projects by leveraging shell scripts and command line tools. Install GitLab Runner on Linux Run CI/CD jobs on FreeBSD SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE GitLab Runner supports FreeBSD and can run jobs natively on this platform. You can automatically build, test, and deploy for FreeBSD-based projects by leveraging shell scripts and command line tools. Install GitLab Runner on FreeBSD Show code coverage rate for your pipelines SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE GitLab is able to parse job output logs and search, via a customizable regex, any information created by tools like SimpleCov to get code coverage. Data is automatically available in the UI and also as a badge you can embed in any HTML page or publish using GitLab Pages. Learn how to generate and show code coverage information in GitLab Details on duration for each command execution in GitLab CI/CD SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Other CI systems show execution time for each single command run in CI jobs, not just the overall time. We’re reconsidering how job output logs are managed in order to add this feature as well. Learn more about job output logs in the documentation Auto DevOps SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Auto DevOps brings DevOps best practices to your project by automatically configuring software development lifecycles by default. It automatically detects, builds, tests, deploys, and monitors applications. Read more about Auto DevOps in the documentation Protected Runners SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Protected Runners allow you to protect your sensitive information, for example deployment credentials, by allowing only jobs running on protected branches to access them. Read more on the issue Easy integration of existing Kubernetes clusters SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Add your existing Kubernetes cluster to your project, and easily access it from your CI/CD pipelines to host Review Apps and to deploy your application. Read more in the docs GitLab Kubernetes Agent SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Manage the deployments and connection to your Kubernetes clusters in a secure and compliant way, driven by code. Read more on the docs Support for multiple Kubernetes clusters SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Easily deploy different environments, like Staging and Production, to different Kubernetes clusters. This allows to enforce strict data separation. Read more in the docs Integrated cluster cost management SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Get a peek at the cost of running your applications in Kubernetes to help with your budgeting requirements. Read through the documentation on setting up cluster cost management Canary Deployments SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE GitLab Premium can monitor your Canary Deployments when deploying your applications with Kubernetes. Canary Deployments can be configured directly through .gitlab-ci.yml, the API, or from the UI of the Deploy Boards. Learn more about configuring Canary Deployments Automatic Retry for Failed CI Jobs SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE You can specify a retry keyword in your .gitlab-ci.yml file to make GitLab CI/CD retry a job for a specific number of times before marking it as failed. Learn more about Automatic Retry for Failed CI Jobs Pipelines security SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE The ability of running CI/CD pipelines on protected branches is checked against a set of security rules that defines if you’re allowed or not. It includes creating new pipelines, retrying jobs, and perform manual actions. Learn more about pipeline security Include external files in CI/CD pipeline definition SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE You can include external files in your pipeline definition file, using them as templates to reuse snippets for common jobs. Learn more about including external files Step folding for CI/CD logs SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Collapse the job log output for each command. Documentation View Kubernetes pod logs SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE The monitoring of servers, application, network and security devices via generated log files to identify errors and problems for analysis. GitLab makes it easy to view the logs of running pods in connected Kubernetes clusters. By displaying the logs directly in GitLab, developers can avoid having to manage console tools or jump to a different interface. Learn more about viewing Kubernetes pod logs Windows Container Executor SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE With this feature you are able to use Docker containers on Windows directly, in much the same was as if they were on Linux hosts. This enables more advanced kinds of pipeline orchestration and management for users of Microsoft platforms. Learn more about the Windows Container Executor Comments in Review Apps SaaS FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Self-Managed FREE PREMIUM ULTIMATE Shorten the feedback cycle and enable stakeholders to provide comments through a form in your review app - which is then automatically added to the related merge request . Learn more about Commenting directly on Review Apps Twitter Facebook YouTube LinkedIn Why GitLab? Product Solutions Services DevOps tools Is it any good? 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