GitHub Actions vs Jenkins: An Honest Comparison from Production

The honest context

I've run Jenkins pipelines managing 30+ microservices and I've migrated teams to GitHub Actions. Both work. The question is never "which is better" — it's "which is better for your situation right now." Here's the breakdown based on real production use, not documentation comparisons.

Where Jenkins still wins

Complex, stateful pipelines

Jenkins has been solving hard pipeline problems for 15 years. If you need pipelines that share state across stages, have complex conditional branching based on external system state, or integrate with on-prem systems via custom plugins — Jenkins handles this more naturally. The plugin ecosystem (1800+ plugins) covers integrations that GitHub Actions simply doesn't have marketplace actions for yet.

Air-gapped / on-prem environments

If your build infrastructure can't touch the internet, Jenkins running on your own hardware is the pragmatic choice. GitHub Actions requires outbound internet access to github.com and the actions marketplace. Self-hosted runners help but add operational overhead.

Fine-grained resource control

Jenkins gives you complete control over build agents — specific hardware, custom OS images, persistent workspaces. GitHub Actions runners are ephemeral by default, which is usually a feature but occasionally a constraint.

# Jenkins — explicit agent with custom label
pipeline {{
  agent {{ label 'gpu-build-node' }}
  stages {{
    stage('Build') {{
      steps {{ sh 'make build' }}
    }}
  }}
}}

Where GitHub Actions wins

Zero infrastructure to manage

This is the big one. Jenkins requires you to maintain the Jenkins controller — upgrades, plugins, security patches, high availability, backup. I've spent more hours patching Jenkins itself than writing pipelines. GitHub Actions has no controller to manage. That operational overhead goes to zero.

Native Git integration

GitHub Actions triggers are tightly integrated with repository events — PRs, pushes, releases, issue comments, manual dispatches. Writing a workflow that triggers on a PR targeting a specific branch with a specific label is 3 lines of YAML. In Jenkins it requires webhooks, plugins, and careful configuration.

# GitHub Actions — trigger on PR to main
on:
  pull_request:
    branches: [ main ]
    paths:
      - 'src/**'
      - 'Dockerfile'

Secrets management

GitHub's encrypted secrets are first-class — scoped to repo, environment, or organisation. Environment protection rules let you require manual approval before secrets are available to a workflow. Replicating this in Jenkins requires the Credentials plugin plus careful configuration to avoid secrets leaking in console output.

Cost at low-to-medium scale

GitHub Actions gives you 2,000 free minutes/month on the free plan, unlimited for public repos. For most teams this covers everything. Jenkins requires compute to run 24/7 whether you're building or not.

The migration reality

I've migrated Jenkins pipelines to GitHub Actions twice. What I've learned:

• Simple pipelines migrate easily — checkout, build, test, push. 1:1 translation in an afternoon.
• Complex shared libraries are painful — Jenkins shared libraries have no direct equivalent. You rewrite them as composite actions or reusable workflows.
• Plugin-dependent steps require research — some Jenkins plugins do things that need a custom action or script in GitHub Actions. Budget time for this.
• Parallel stages are different — Jenkins parallel stages and GitHub Actions matrix strategies solve similar problems differently. Plan the translation carefully.

My current recommendation

The teams I've seen get into trouble are the ones that migrate because GitHub Actions is "modern" without accounting for the rewrite cost of their Jenkins shared libraries and custom plugins. The best pipeline is the one your team can maintain and debug at 2am.