I love buildkite and I wish they had better pricing model -- we would definitely love to pay for more.

Pros of buildkite:

- Very powerful. Plugin system is amazing and easy to extend. We wrote our own buildkite-docker executor, and I merged a lot of parts from it to the docker plugin upstream

- UI is a lot prettier and responsive than Gitlab's

- Dynamic pipelines !

- Hooks are extensive and powerful. Precheckout, Checkout, PostCheckout, precommand, command, postcommand. You got it all.

- The GraphQL API is amazing, and probably one of the best API I've used in my life.

- Pipelines are composable. You can make a yaml include another yaml. This was our biggest gripe with Gitlab since we use a monorepo and it got pretty big

- I know for a lot of people it doesn't mean a lot, but I like emojis in the output

- Agents are not stored like Gitlab. In Gitlab, once an agent connects, it gets stored in the database and never disappear until you delete it. It's problematic for our use case, because we use pre-emptibles node to save cost. It's 30% of the real price, and it dies every 24 hours. after 3 months, our Gitlab got super slow because it retained all the infos on all runners that existed. I had to make a script that deleted it from the database.

- Job retries!

- Docs are pretty dope

- Annotate is very cool (https://buildkite.com/docs/agent/v3/cli-annotate)

- Block step. Useful for confirming before deploy or something.

- Pretty cheap (unlimited builds, you pay per user). Honestly, I would love to pay them more.

Cons of buildkite:

- It's not free, so Gitlab is hard to beat on that.

- Gitlab works fine for 99% of the use case.

Take a look at their changelog, a bunch of screenshots and you'll see their development pace =)

https://buildkite.com/changelog

Have used Buildkite at a previous workplace. Really liked the UI. This is coming from someone who has used Jenkins, Travis, Codeship, and GitLab CI.

Their front-end is open source: https://github.com/buildkite/frontend

However, if you add your own CI runners, you'd have to clean them up periodically. This was the biggest issue for us, because even after cleaning them up from all docker images once a week, builds would get stuck.

Lox from Buildkite here. We have a docker-compose plugin that has a cleanup hook at the end of it for cleaning up docker containers and networks from your build. https://github.com/buildkite-plugins/docker-compose-buildkit...

We run buildkite-agents in its own kubernetes cluster, and the nodes are pre-emptible on Google Cloud so 30% of the price and it dies everyday, so it gets cleanup automatically

Can you expand on that? Do you mean if you're running your own Buildkite agents, there's a manual gc process devops should be aware of?

Love buildkite. It's insanely affordable too, and I like using it more than any other CI tool.