Gitlab CI vs Jenkins comparison of Continuous Integration servers

	Gitlab CI https://about.gitlab.com/product/continuous-integration/	Jenkins https://jenkins.io
Unique feature	AutoDev Ops / Allows keeping code management and CI in the same place	Plugins
Type of product	SaaS / On Premise	Self-hosted / On Premise
Offers a free plan	Yes Very generous free plans for both the SaaS version as well as the on premise version.	Yes Free, open source software
Predictable pricing	Yes Clear and affordable pricing for both SaaS and self-hosted versions.	Yes Jenkins is free software, the only costs are those assigned to running your infrastructure.
Support / SLA	Yes All paid plans include next business day support.	No (partial) No official support available, or SLAs. However, Jenkins' popularity ensures you'll find support in various places (official Jenkins forum, IRC, StackOverflow etc.)
Paralellism Every CI servers tends to address this differently (parallel, distributed, build matrix). Some of it is just marketing, and some is just nuance. For this table, parallel means that tasks can be run concurrently on the same machine, distributed means that tasks can be scaled horizontally, on multiple machines How to split tests in parallel in the optimal way with Knapsack Pro	Yes Easily configure jobs you want to be run in parallel via the YML config file (gitlab-ci.yml)	Yes (partial) Jenkins allows builds to be run in parallel, but all builds share the same environment and there can be issues arising from shared resources such as the filesystem.
Distributed builds distributed means that tasks can be scaled horizontally, on multiple machines How to split tests in parallel in the optimal way with Knapsack Pro	Yes	Yes (partial) Jenkins has a concept of master server and agents, for distributing builds, but setting that up requires quite a bit of manual work from a sysadmin, compared to other options.
Containers support / Build environment	Yes The Docker Container Registry is integrated into GitLab by default	No (partial) By default, Jenkins runs all builds in the same environment as the build server itself, which can lead to numerous issues and is generally not a good practice. Some plugins address this issue, but they need to be manually installed.
Analytics / Status overview Analytics and overview referrs to the ability to, at a glance, see what's breaking (be it a certain task, or the build for a specific project)	Yes	Yes Available via the Blue Ocean project (part of Jenkins): https://jenkins.io/doc/book/blueocean/dashboard/#dashboard
Management support How easy is it to manage users / projects / assign roles and permissions and so on	Yes	No In practice, for Jenkins it usually means that there's someone solely in charge of the Jenkins instance (configuration, management). Collaboration features built into other similar products are lacking, as are governance features (no easy way to tell from Jenkins alone _who_ is responsabile for a broken build, for example), even if your Version Control Server of choice can give that information (via `git blame` for example).
Self-hosted option	Yes	Yes Jenkins is Open Source Software, and self-hosting is the only way to use it.
Hosted plans / SaaS	Yes	No Only available for self-hosting.
Build pipelines A continuous delivery pipeline is a description of the process that the software goes through from a new code commit, through testing and other statical analysis steps all the way to the end-users of the product.	Yes Defined via YML config files	Yes Offers extensive support for custom pipelines, either through the Jenkins Pipeline DSL, written in a Jenkinsfile, either through the Web UI. Also, their Blue Ocean project is a great tool for building pipelines: https://jenkins.io/projects/blueocean/
Reports Reports are about the abilty to see specific reports (like code coverage or custom ones), but not necesarily tied in into a larger dashboard.	Yes	Yes Has ready-made integrations for standard reports such as JUnit test results.
Ecosystem Besides the official documentation and software, is there a large community using this product? Are there any community-driven tools / plugins that you can use?	Yes	> 1000 community plugins Thanks to it's popularity, there's a large selection of available plugins for Jenkins. They can all be easily browsed over at https://plugins.jenkins.io/. The downside is that almost anything you want to do in Jenkins requires installing a plugin, even core functionality such as parsing output or checking out source code.
Specific language support: Ruby Some CI servers have built-in support for parsing RSpec or Istanbul output for example and we mention those. Some others make it even easier by detecting Gemfiles or package.json and automate parts of the process for the developer.	Yes Although not built into GitLab CI by default, the Docker support allows solving any Ruby specific need that may arise.	Yes (Partial) RSpec and Cucumber test suites can be integrated into Jenkins thanks to the large pool of available plugins and Ruby gems. Jenkins only understands the JUnit format natively.
Specific language support: JavaScript	Yes Although not built into GitLab CI by default, the Docker support allows solving any Javascript specific need that may arise.	Yes (Partial) Jest, AVA and other test suites can be integrated into Jenkins thanks to the large pool of available plugins and NPM packages. Jenkins only understands the JUnit format natively.
Integrations 1st party support for common tools (like Slack notifications, various VCS platforms, etc)	Yes Plenty of third party integrations available throughout GitLab, most notably Kubernetes and GitHub, but also plenty of others: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/integration/README.html	Yes Allows integrations with other tools (ie: Slack, GitHub) or communication protocols (ie: email) via it's rich plugin suite
API Custom integreation is available, via an API or otherwise, it's mentioned separately as it allows further customization than any of the Ecosystem/Integration options	Yes Provides a REST API and a (new) GraphQL API, with plans to maintain the GraphQL API only going forward. Allows doing almost anything that can be done via the interface, at least in terms of CI needs.	Yes For use-cases that the +1k plugins don't cover, the Jenkins Remote API is yet another way to integrate Jenkins into your favorite tools or internal products.
Auditing	Yes	No Jenkins instances are really managed by a sole user with administrative privileges. This can lead to various issues when it comes to audit trails / accountability.
Additional notes	The Auto DevOps feature might be interesting to people looking for a very hands-off experience with getting a CI/CD process up and running https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/topics/autodevops/

Programming Language	Supported test runners	Installation guide	Knapsack Pro Library README / Source
Ruby	RSpec, Cucumber, Minitest, test-unit, Spinach, Turnip	Install	knapsack_pro gem
JavaScript	Cypress.io	Install	@knapsack-pro/cypress
JavaScript	Jest	Install	@knapsack-pro/jest
JavaScript / TypeScript	Any test runner in JavaScript	How to build native integration with Knapsack Pro API to run tests in parallel for any test runner	@knapsack-pro/core
Any programming language	Any test runner	How to build a custom Knapsack Pro API client from scratch in any programming language	-

Gitlab CI vs Jenkins comparison of Continuous Integration servers What are the differences between Gitlab CI and Jenkins?

Gitlab CI

Jenkins

AutoDev Ops / Allows keeping code management and CI in the same place

Plugins

SaaS / On Premise

Self-hosted / On Premise

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

No (partial)

Yes

Yes (partial)

Yes

Yes (partial)

Yes

No (partial)

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

> 1000 community plugins

Yes

Yes (Partial)

Yes

Yes (Partial)

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

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GitLab CI parallelisation - how to run parallel jobs for Ruby & JavaScript projects

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Gitlab CI vs Jenkins comparison of Continuous Integration servers
What are the differences between Gitlab CI and Jenkins?

How to run parallel tests on Gitlab CI and Jenkins
to execute 1-hour test suite in 2 minutes?

How much can you save with faster tests
on Gitlab CI and Jenkins?