GitHub Actions
72/100The default for code on GitHub, with the biggest ecosystem; slow and costly at volume unless you speed it up.
Who it suits
Any team whose code lives on GitHub and wants CI with nothing new to buy or learn.
Who should avoid it
Your code is not on GitHub, or you already wait more than a few minutes per change and do nothing about it.
| Criterion (weight) | Score | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Pipeline speed (20%) | ●●●●● | Standard runners are 2-core for Linux; larger runners cost more. Speed depends on your workflow design. |
| Caching (10%) | ●●●●● | actions/cache and setup-* caches, 10 GB per repository included; you write the keys. |
| Parallelism (10%) | ●●●●● | Matrix strategy and parallel jobs; you shard and balance tests yourself. |
| Hosting model (10%) | ●●●●● | GitHub-hosted Linux, Windows and macOS, plus self-hosted runners; the control plane is GitHub's. |
| Pricing transparency (10%) | ●●●●● | Per-minute rates for every runner type and the included allowance per plan are published. |
| Migration effort (15%) | ●●●●● | Nothing to move if you are already on GitHub; GitHub Actions Importer helps teams coming from other CI. |
| Ecosystem (10%) | ●●●●● | The largest public marketplace of actions; most vendors publish an action first. |
| Fit for agent-written changes (15%) | ●●●●● | Agent pull requests each run the full workflow on runners you size and pay for per minute. |
Strengths
- Built into GitHub: pull request checks, branch protection and secrets in one place
- The largest marketplace of ready-made actions
- Free for standard runners in public repositories; self-hosted runners free to attach
- Published per-minute rates for every runner type
Limits
- Standard 2-core hosted runners are slow for large builds and test suites
- Cache is a key-based actions/cache, 10 GB per repository included, restored over the network
- You design and balance test shards yourself with a matrix
- Every change runs every test unless you build selection
Cost
Linux 2-core $0.006 a minute; plans include a monthly compute allowance ($12 on Free, $18 on Team, $300 on Enterprise Cloud); free in public repositories. As published on GitHub Actions’s pricing page; check there before you budget.
Verdict
GitHub Actions is where most teams already are, and for good reason: it is built into pull requests, its marketplace is the largest, and its pricing is published per minute. Its weakness is the wait. Standard runners are small, the cache is something you wire up per workflow, and every change runs the whole suite, which is fine at ten pull requests a day and painful at a hundred. The best answer for most teams is not to leave it but to make it faster: see the next section and our guide to making GitHub Actions faster.