Teams look for a CircleCI alternative when the credit meter becomes hard to forecast, when the CI service should sit next to the code host they already pay for, or when a pipeline security incident made them want fewer secrets stored with a third party. They move to the CI built into their code host, to a flat per-minute service, or to a server they run themselves.
Short answer: The closest replacements for CircleCI in our CI/CD tool ranking are GitHub Actions, Bitbucket Pipelines and Azure Pipelines. Choose GitHub Actions if your repositories are on GitHub and you want CI without a second vendor. All 12 alternatives below are ranked products from Best CI/CD Tools in 2026, and each says where it differs from CircleCI.
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Pricing: Credits bought up front and spent per machine-minute, published; free plan available
Established in: United States
Built for: Teams that want hosted CI that scales with job volume and parallel test runs
Not for: Buyers who want a flat per-seat price they can easily forecast
01
Why buyers look past CircleCI
01
A credit meter instead of a minute price
CircleCI sells credits and spends them on machine size, active users and add-on features. A Linux medium job burns 10 credits a minute, Docker layer caching costs 200 credits per job run, and network or storage above the plan allowance is 420 credits per GB. Each line is published, but the monthly bill takes a spreadsheet to predict.
02
Users and compute are both billed
On the Performance plan every active user beyond the five included adds 25,000 credits a month on top of the compute you use, and paid credits expire after twelve months. Teams with many occasional committers pay for headcount as well as minutes, which is the pattern a flat per-minute service avoids.
03
Secrets stored in a separate CI vendor
CircleCI's January 2023 incident led it to tell customers to rotate every secret stored in the platform, and it rotated GitHub OAuth tokens and removed older API tokens on their behalf. The company published a full report, but some security teams now prefer CI that runs inside their code host or on infrastructure they control.
Declarative GitOps continuous delivery controller for Kubernetes clusters
you deploy to Kubernetes and want Git as the source of truth for what runs
#9
03
What each one does differently
1
GitHub Actions
United States · Included minutes per plan, then per-minute billing by runner type, published; free for public repositories
Built into GitHub, so no separate CI account, and standard hosted runners are free for public repositories and for self-hosted runners. Private repositories get a plan quota (2,000 minutes on GitHub Free, 3,000 on Team), then per-minute billing, from $0.006 for a 2-core Linux runner. It only makes sense if your code lives on GitHub.
Switch from CircleCI if your repositories are on GitHub and you want CI without a second vendor.
Australia · Per user per month for Bitbucket plus build minutes, published; extra minutes sold in blocks
Included in Bitbucket Cloud, with 50 build minutes on the free plan (up to 5 users), 2,500 on Standard at $3.65 per user a month and 3,500 on Premium at $7.25. Extra minutes are sold at $10 per 1,000. It is tied to Bitbucket repositories, so it fits teams already in Atlassian tooling.
Switch from CircleCI if your code is in Bitbucket and you already work in Jira.
United States · Per parallel job, published; free tier of one hosted job and one self-hosted job
Priced per parallel job rather than per credit: one free Microsoft-hosted job with 1,800 minutes a month and one free self-hosted job, then $40 per extra hosted job and $15 per extra self-hosted job. Cheap for self-hosting, but the Azure DevOps surface is broader than a team that only wants CI needs.
Switch from CircleCI if you want parallel-job pricing and already use Microsoft tooling.
Serbia · Pay-as-you-go per machine-minute, published; monthly free credit included
Prices compute as a published machine-minute rate (Ubuntu x64 2 vCPU at $0.0075 a minute, self-hosted agents at $0.0025) with $15 of free credit a month and 20 concurrent jobs by default. Support is sold separately from $50 a month, so the compute price stays plain. Its source is published on GitHub.
Switch from CircleCI if you want a plain per-minute price and the option to run agents yourself.
Australia · Per active user per month, published; hosted compute billed separately by the vCPU minute
Splits the control plane from the build agents: you run agents on your own infrastructure or use Buildkite hosted agents. The Pro plan is $30 per active user a month with 4,000 Linux minutes included, the free plan allows 5 users. It leaves you more to operate than CircleCI's fully hosted model.
Switch from CircleCI if you want builds to run on your own machines but not run the orchestration yourself.
Estonia · Pay-as-you-go per build minute by machine, or fixed annual plans, published; monthly free minutes
Aimed at mobile and Flutter apps, with macOS, Linux and Windows machines. Pay-as-you-go is $0.045 a minute on Linux and Windows and $0.095 on Mac mini M2, and the free plan gives 500 M2 minutes a month for one user. It is not a general-purpose CI for backend services.
Switch from CircleCI if most of your builds are iOS and Android apps.
Czechia · Cloud billed per committer with build credits; Professional edition is free, paid licences per agent
A JetBrains server you install yourself. The Professional edition is free without a licence key, with 3 build agents, up to 100 build configurations and 10 pipelines. Enterprise lifts those caps with a paid licence. It asks for a server and an administrator that CircleCI's hosted service does not.
Switch from CircleCI if you want a self-installed server with a free tier and have someone to maintain it.
Not stated by the vendor · Free and open source; cost is servers and maintenance time
An open source automation server under the MIT licence that you run yourself, extended through plugins. There is no vendor bill, only servers and maintenance time, and no hosted service from the project. It is the most flexible option here and also the one that needs the most upkeep.
Switch from CircleCI if you want no licence cost and can staff the upkeep of your own CI server.
Not stated by the vendor · Free and open source; you pay only for the servers you run it on
A community CI engine under the Apache 2.0 licence that runs each pipeline step in a container and supports multiple dependent workflows. It is free and has no hosted plan, so you provide the servers. Its feature set is smaller than CircleCI's, with fewer integrations and no vendor support.
Switch from CircleCI if you want a light, container-based, self-run engine with a permissive licence.
United States · Paid plans quoted per organisation by module; open-source tools included at no cost
A broader delivery platform: CI, CD, infrastructure as code, security testing and more as modules. There is a free plan that includes Harness Open Source, while Essentials and Enterprise are quoted through sales. Heavier than CircleCI if you only need builds, and priced in conversations, not on a page.
Switch from CircleCI if you are consolidating CI, delivery and security testing under one vendor.
Australia · Annual plans for Cloud or Server, published; free plan with fixed limits
Handles release and deployment rather than building code: it integrates with build servers and manages environments, approvals and runbooks. It has a free plan limited to 10 projects, on Octopus Cloud or on a server you host. It complements a CI tool more than it replaces CircleCI.
Switch from CircleCI if your pain is promoting releases across environments, not running builds.
Not stated by the vendor · Free and open source; no vendor price list
A declarative GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes under the Apache 2.0 licence. It syncs cluster state from Git and does not build or test code, so it replaces only the deploy half of a CircleCI pipeline. There is no vendor price, only the cluster it runs on.
Switch from CircleCI if you deploy to Kubernetes and want Git as the source of truth for what runs.
CircleCI remains the right choice for a team that wants a hosted CI service independent of its code host, with a free plan of 30,000 credits a month and five users, Docker, Linux, Windows, Arm and macOS environments, self-hosted runners and an on-premises Server option. Open source projects can draw up to 400,000 credits a month. If you work across GitHub and Bitbucket, or the usage-based model suits a bursty workload, moving to a host-bound CI buys little.
05
What moving off CircleCI involves
01
Rewriting the pipeline definitions
CircleCI configuration, orbs and executors have no direct equivalent elsewhere. Budget for translating each workflow by hand, starting with the jobs that run most often. The caching, parallelism and test-splitting setup is where behaviour changes most between tools.
02
Secrets and tokens
Move every environment variable and context to the new system, rotate any credential that sat in CircleCI, and revoke the old OAuth and deploy keys when you leave. Rotate at the source, not just in CircleCI, as the vendor itself advised after its 2023 incident.
03
Estimating the new cost before you commit
Convert your CircleCI credit usage into minutes by machine size (10 credits a minute on Linux medium), then price those minutes at the new tool's rate. Include the seat-based parts of the new bill, such as per-user plans, as well as compute.
06
Questions about replacing CircleCI
5 answers
Is GitHub Actions a good alternative to CircleCI?
Yes, if your repositories are on GitHub. It removes a separate vendor, is free on standard runners for public repositories, and bills private repositories per minute after a plan quota.
It is tied to GitHub, so teams on several code hosts lose the independence CircleCI gives them.
Which CircleCI alternative is free?
Jenkins (MIT licence), Woodpecker CI (Apache 2.0) and Argo CD (Apache 2.0) are free software you run yourself. TeamCity Professional is free with 3 agents.
Semaphore, Buildkite, Codemagic and Harness have free plans with limits, and GitHub Actions is free on standard runners for public repositories.
Why do CircleCI bills vary from month to month?
Usage is converted to credits by machine size, active users and add-ons such as Docker layer caching.
Credits on the Free plan expire monthly, and network or storage over the allowance is charged at 420 credits per GB. A change in job length or resource class shifts the bill directly.
Can I run CircleCI on my own infrastructure?
Partly. CircleCI offers self-hosted runners that execute jobs on your machines (not charged per build minute, with network egress above the allowance billed), and CircleCI Server for on-premises installation. The control plane for the cloud product stays with CircleCI.
Do I have to rewrite my pipelines?
Yes. There is no automatic converter between CircleCI configuration and the formats of other tools. The effort scales with the number of workflows, orbs and custom executors you use, so plan the migration job by job.
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Sources
Checked 8 October 2026
CircleCI pricing: free plan, Performance plan, credit prices, user pricing, expiry, open source credits, Docker layer caching, egress, self-hosted runners.
