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Migrate your CI/CD from GitHub Actions to Semaphore

  • ✔️ Run 2x faster builds
  • ✔️ See your entire path to production in a single CD view
  • ✔️ Always have CI/CD experts at hand to support you

Cut your build times in half using Semaphore’s top-of-market machines and advanced pipeline features. Considering how often developers push code in a month, the ROI of switching to Semaphore is 41:1 (see whitepaper).

On Semaphore, a graphical workflow builder puts high-performance CI/CD into the hands of every developer. Test insights empower the team to keep the project sustainable, while fast SSH debugging enables fast error recovery in daily work.

On Semaphore, CD is not limited to a series of after-build steps. Features like parameterized promotions and deployment queues give you the power and flexibility to make deploys to any environment completely painless.

For us, CI/CD is not an afterthought. You can always count on Semaphore as a trusted partner who will go the extra mile in supporting you in your mission to deliver great software, fast.

“Since moving from GitHub Actions to Semaphore our CI pipeline has been more stable and 2x faster. This allowed us to detect failures and flaky tests faster. Our engineering team is now more focused on core business and delivering features to our customers.”

Senior Software Engineer at Klarx

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Compare Semaphore vs. Github Actions

  Semaphore GitHub Actions
Product type
SaaS
SaaS with autoscaling resources
Hard limits on parallel jobs depending on plan
Hybrid: run agents on customer-managed infrastructure
Fully on-premises
Setup & Maintenance
Graphical pipeline configuration
Workflow Builder: point-and-click interface to create and edit pipelines
GitHub support
Bitbucket support
Gitlab support Pending
No maintenance required for platform software
Official VMs and Docker images are refreshed weekly, include popular OSS tools out-of-the-box
Jobs must run a Docker container for each language or tool that a project needs
Command-line interface
CLI can manage projects and do everything the UI can
CLI limited to viewing workflow results
Declarative configuration of services
Supported via CLI
Machine & Operating System support
Multiple machine types in cloud model
Wide choice of CPU, memory, and disk space configurations
End user maintains the machines
Linux
macOS
Max 5 parallel jobs on standard plans
ARM
Supported in self-hosted model
Supported in self-hosted model
Windows
Supported in self-hosted model
Supported in cloud and self-hosted models
Continuous Integration
Test results reporting and insights
See which tests passed/failed, find slowest tests to speed up development process.
Debugging feedback loop
Fast debugging via SSH access to both running and finished jobs.
No direct SSH access to job environment, only log inspection.
Continuous Delivery
Manage multiple deployment environments
Multi-stage releases
Combine automatic steps with manual approval to ensure maximum reliability when delivering to users.
Automatic and manual promotions
Chain pipelines together for any CD workflow (blue/green, canary, etc).
Deployment dashboards
See which versions of all your applications have been deployed to which environment.
Parameterized promotions
Define custom forms to parameterize CD pipelines.
Deployment queues
Control which pipelines must run sequentially to prevent conflict and which may run in parallel.
Performance
Top-of-market performance
25%-100% faster than GitHub Actions workflows, depending on project
Autoscaling parallelism
Serverless model
With hard limits depending on plan
Allocate more CPUs and RAM to complex jobs
Change one line of configuration
Scalable dependency cache
9.6GB upgradeable on request, expires after 30 days
10GB hard limit, expires after 7 days
Built-in artifacts store
Built-in Docker registry
Support
Email-based account and technical support
Video call support
Support SLAs
Custom solution engineering
Dedicated customer success manager
Private Slack channel

Case studies

“We were using Jenkins to build the old system, and it was hard to maintain and quite painful. We looked at other hosted CI services, but they were very unreliable. When we found Semaphore, we got our application up and running pretty quickly. We now use it for all projects.”

CTO at Simply Business

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“Semaphore allows us to build anywhere from two to twenty branches in parallel, each one in a threaded environment. We had thousands of tests that were running for a really long time and with Semaphore we got the build to run in under 20 minutes.”

QA Lead at 500px

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“Semaphore 2.0 allows us to build, tag, push, and run Docker images easily. This makes building a powerful pipeline where we can deploy to our Kubernetes cluster fairly easily and quickly.”

Senior Software Engineer

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