Buildkite vs Portainer Pricing (2026)
How do these two stack up on price? Here's what each one costs, what you get, and where the value sits.
Free Plan
- Up to 5 users
- Up to 10 concurrent jobs
- Up to 2,000 Linux vCPU minutes per month
- Up to 250k test executions per month
- Dynamic pipelines
- Community support
Pro Plan
- Up to 50 users
- Up to 250 concurrent agents, 10 included
- Includes 4,000 Linux vCPU minutes per month with access to macOS agents, larger machine sizes, and higher concurrency
- 1M test executions per month
- Dynamic pipelines
- Priority email support
Enterprise Plan
- Custom usage and rate limits
- Full access to Buildkite's testing platform
- Buildkite hosted agents with remote Docker builders, private container registry, largest machine sizes, Linux ARM64, and scalable concurrency
- Custom storage and retention policies for builds, artifacts, and logs
- Dynamic pipelines
- 99.95% platform uptime commitment
- SCIM, custom SAML & ADFS
- Private log and artifact storage
- Audit log exports
- Observability integrations, including EventBridge and SIEM
- Advanced governance and control
- Access to Enterprise support with SLA credits
- Priority response times
- Slack Connect
Starter
- Community support
- Max of 16 vCPUs per node
Scale
- 9x5 next business day support
- Max of 24 vCPUs per node
- Vendor onboarding
- Purchases via Resellers
Enterprise
- Prioritized 9x5 next business day support
- Choose from 32 vCPUs - Unlimited vCPUs per node
- Production and Non-Production Node Options
- Customizable License Agreement
- Assigned Support Engineer
- Security Assessment Report
- TAA Compliance Certificate
- Managed Platform Services Option
- 24/7 Support Option
IIoT Professional
- All Business Edition features
- Onboarding assistance included
- 9×5 support
- Click-through license agreement
- Professional Services available (add-on)
- Async edge agent: offline-safe operation
- Fleet grouping and staged rollouts
IIoT Enterprise
- Industrial App Portal ; included
- Prioritized 9×5 support
- Assigned support engineer
- Customizable license agreement
- Vendor onboarding available
- Multi-instance (prod, dev, test)
- Security assessment report
- Professional Services available (add-on)
Home & Student
- All Portainer Business Edition features
- Up to 15 nodes
- Docker, Swarm, and Kubernetes support
- Full RBAC and access control
- GitOps and app templates
- Community support via GitHub Discussions
Buildkite vs Portainer FAQ
- Which one is cheaper?
- Portainer is the cheaper option, starting at $12/mo vs $30/mo for Buildkite.
- Can I use either one for free?
- Both offer free plans, so you can try each without paying. Start with whichever fits your workflow better and upgrade when you hit the limits.
- How do they charge?
- Different approach here. Buildkite uses per-seat pricing, while Portainer goes with hybrid. That changes the math depending on your team size and usage.
- Which one is a better deal?
- Depends on what you need. Buildkite: At $30/seat, Buildkite sits mid-to-premium compared to usage-based tools that can look cheaper on paper but spike unpredictably with build volume. They're clearly courting engineering teams who've been burned by surprise CI bills and want the trade-off of predictable per-seat cost even if it means paying for people who rarely trigger builds. Portainer: Portainer sits mid-market — not the cheapest way to slap a UI on Docker, but far more affordable than heavyweight platforms like Rancher or OpenShift once you factor in the free-forever 3-node tier. They're clearly courting small ops teams and homelabbers first, then trying to convert them into paying customers as node count grows organically.
Still deciding? See the best Buildkite alternatives or the best Portainer alternatives, ranked with verified pricing.
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