Netlify Build vs Jenkins comparison of Continuous Integration servers

	Netlify Build https://www.netlify.com/products/build/	Jenkins https://jenkins.io
Unique feature	Deploy your sites to global Netlify infrastructure Every commit gets its own deployed version. Automatically attach a new Deploy Preview at a unique permanent URL whenever you submit a Pull/Merge Request. Set Netlify Build to deploy every branch in the repository for unlimited staging environments.	Plugins
Type of product	SaaS	Self-hosted / On Premise
Offers a free plan	Yes 300 build minutes/month, 1 concurrent CI build	Yes Free, open source software
Predictable pricing	Yes Extra 500 build minutes costs $7/month. User seat $15/user/month.	Yes Jenkins is free software, the only costs are those assigned to running your infrastructure.
Support / SLA	Yes 99.99% uptime SLA for Starter and Pro plan. Business plan has negotiable SLA.	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 Starter plan (free) has only 1 concurrent build but Pro plan has 3 concurrent builds included.	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 High-Performance Builds - The premium build environment gives more concurrency, processing power and asynchronous deploys.	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 When you trigger a build on Netlify, their buildbot starts a Docker container to build your website. The buildbot will look for instructions about required languages and software needed to run your command before running build command. The instructions are called dependencies, and how you declare them depends on the programming languages and tools used in build. Build image selection is available. Until recently, all Netlify sites were built using the same build image. Netlify is experimenting with allowing customers to select from multiple Docker images with different operating systems and software versions.	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 Simple dashboard to see CI builds. Other than CI analytics Netlify has Netlify Analytics that brings data captured directly from their servers for your website.	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 Team members managment. Role-based access control only in business plan.	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	No	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, partially Simple steps, define your own steps in bash commands	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.	No	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?	No There are only small helpful things like incoming webhooks so other services can trigger Netlify deploys, and send outgoing webhooks as a deploy starts, succeeds, or fails.	> 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 It has support for Ruby.	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 It has support for JavaScript.	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 Netlify has incoming webhooks so other services can trigger Netlify deploys, and send outgoing webhooks as a deploy starts, succeeds, or fails. For instance you can integrate it with Slack.	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	No	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	N/A	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

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	-

Netlify Build vs Jenkins comparison of Continuous Integration servers What are the differences between Netlify Build and Jenkins?

Netlify Build

Jenkins

Deploy your sites to global Netlify infrastructure

Plugins

SaaS

Self-hosted / On Premise

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

No (partial)

Yes

Yes (partial)

Yes

Yes (partial)

Yes

No (partial)

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

No

Yes

Yes

No

Yes, partially

Yes

No

Yes

No

> 1000 community plugins

Yes

Yes (Partial)

Yes

Yes (Partial)

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

N/A

No

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Netlify Build vs Jenkins comparison of Continuous Integration servers
What are the differences between Netlify Build and Jenkins?

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

How much can you save with faster tests
on Netlify Build and Jenkins?