GitHub Actions and Jenkins can both run powerful CI/CD pipelines, but they optimize for different realities.
GitHub Actions is tightly integrated with GitHub and tends to be faster to adopt, with workflows defined in YAML and a large marketplace of reusable actions. Jenkins is self-hosted and extremely customizable through plugins and scripting — but that flexibility comes with operational overhead (installation, upgrades, plugin maintenance, scaling, and security hardening).
In the full comparison, we break down:
- Setup and maintenance differences (hosted convenience vs self-managed control)
- Pipeline authoring and extensibility (YAML/actions vs Groovy/plugins)
- Scaling and runner models (GitHub-hosted/self-hosted vs Jenkins agents)
- Security and governance considerations (secrets, permissions, auditability)
- How to decide based on team size, compliance needs, and existing tooling
➡️ Read the full article on our blog:
https://spacelift.io/blog/github-actions-vs-jenkins
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