Portainer vs Buildkite Pricing (2026)
How do these two stack up on price? Here's what each one costs, what you get, and where the value sits.
| Portainer pricing | Buildkite pricing | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | $1045/mo | $30/mo |
| Number of plans | 3 | 3 |
| Free plan | — | |
| Free trial | ||
| Pricing model | hybrid | hybrid |
Price is one row. To weigh the features too, use our feature comparison template →
Starter
- 5, 10, or 15 nodes
- Community support
- Up to 16 vCPUs per node
- Online purchase only, not via resellers
Scale
Popular- 5 to 25 nodes
- 9x5 next business day support
- Up to 24 vCPUs per node
- Vendor onboarding
- Available through resellers
Enterprise
- 32 to unlimited vCPUs per node
- Prioritized 9x5 support, 24/7 option
- Production and non-production nodes
- Customizable license agreement
- Assigned support engineer
- Security assessment report
- TAA compliance certificate
- Managed platform services option
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
Popular- 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
Portainer vs Buildkite FAQ
- Which one is cheaper?
- Buildkite is the cheaper option, starting at $30/mo vs $1045/mo for Portainer.
- Can I use either one for free?
- Buildkite has a free plan. Portainer doesn't — though they do offer a free trial.
- How do they charge?
- Both use a hybrid model, so the comparison is straightforward — it comes down to features and limits at each price point.
- Which one is a better deal?
- Depends on what you need. Portainer: At four-figures-a-month before you even hit Enterprise, Portainer is priced for infrastructure teams at mid-size to large companies, not solo devs or small startups — this isn't competing with free/cheap container UIs, it's going after teams who'll pay for a polished management layer across many nodes. The 15-node, 45-day extended trial for Enterprise signals they're chasing larger deployments where the sales cycle is longer and the node count matters more than feature checklists. Buildkite: At $30/mo to start, Buildkite undercuts CircleCI and GitHub Actions' higher usage tiers while still positioning itself as infrastructure-grade rather than a bargain tool. It's chasing engineering orgs that want self-hosted agent control without paying full enterprise CI prices out of the gate.
Still deciding? See the best Portainer alternatives or the best Buildkite alternatives, ranked with verified pricing.
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