Migrate your CI/CD from Jenkins to Semaphore
- Modernize aging code delivery processes
- Accelerate deployment frequency with faster builds
- Free up developers’ time for more valuable work
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Semaphore vs. Jenkins
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Speed up the feedback loop from idea to customer and back again
Remove obstacles to continuous delivery
With Jenkins, CI/CD is a black box locked in a silo. Without access, it’s hard for developers to focus on quality, shorten test cycles, and ensure safe deployment. With Semaphore, you get:
- Clutter-free UI
- Effective pipeline visualizations
- Help getting on board
- Support with continuous testing and deployment
Eliminate non-differentiating heavy lifting
There are entire books written about running Jenkins, and for a reason. It’s free to use but puts the burden of managing, securing, and scaling CI/CD squarely on your team. With Semaphore, you get:
- auto-scaling or hybrid cloud solution
- No maintenance
- More focus on building great products
Increase developer productivity & happiness
The data is in: after switching to Semaphore, an average team of a dozen engineers saves over 500 human hours per month (see whitepaper). The reason? Faster builds, infinite on-demand capacity to test in parallel, and smart pipeline.
- Saves over 500 human hours per month (see whitepaper)
- Faster builds
- infinite on-demand capacity to test in parallel
- smart pipeline optimization features
Standardize CI/CD across teams and projects
Jenkins adoption is typically fragmented, with each team having their unique instance with challenges that include brittle configuration and outdated plugins. With Semaphore, you get:
- CI/CD configuration is stored as code
- runs on cloud native, iOS, and Android environments
- centralized permission management
“I’ve been doing CI/CD for more than 15 years. Semaphore is hands-down the best product I’ve used. An incredibly flexible platform, but without the open-ended bloat of Jenkins. It’s extremely intuitive and easy to navigate.”
Ben Peterson, Principle Software Engineer
Compare Semaphore vs. Jenkins
| Semaphore | Jenkins | |
|---|---|---|
| Product type |  |
 |
| SaaS | SaaS with autoscaling resources | No |
| Hybrid | Hybrid: run Semaphore agents on customer-managed infrastructure, use cloud-based UI | Yes |
| Fully on-premises | Yes | Fully hosted and configured by the end user |
| Setup |  |
|
| Standard project set up a in a few clicks | Yes. Authenticate with Git provider, select repository, import repository as project | Provision machines for CI/CD, install Jenkins on them, install plugins for Git integration and any additional functionality |
| GitHub support | Yes | Yes |
| Bitbucket support | Yes | Yes |
| Gitlab support | Pending | Yes |
| Standardized product | Yes. All users use the same product maintained by Semaphore | No. Piece together functionality from plugins with varying syntax, documentation, and best practices |
| Graphical pipeline configuration | Yes. Workflow Builder: point-and-click interface to create and edit pipelines | No |
| Standardized configuration language | Yes. Declarative YAML configuration for all features | No. Multiple DSLs: pipelines are defined in one of two Groovy-based domain specific languages, one for simple declarative tasks, and one for more complex scripting. |
| Command-line interface | Yes. CLI can manage projects and do everything the UI can. | No. CLI limited to managing Jenkins instances |
| Ease of Maintenance | |
 |
| No maintenance required for hardware | Yes | No. End user maintains the machines |
| No maintenance required for platform software | Yes. Official VMs and Docker images are refreshed weekly, include popular OSS tools out-of-the-box | No. Requires dedicated person / team (SPOF) |
| No maintenance required for user-facing product | Yes. All UI, including real-time and historical pipeline visualizations, logs, and test results is made and continuously improved by Semaphore | No. End user maintains individual plugins with varying release cycles and support |
| Declarative configuration of services | Yes. Supported via CLI | No |
| Hot upgrades without downtime | Yes. Use new product features as soon as they are released | No. Troubleshoot plugins for interoperability and deal with breaking changes |
| Operating system support |  |
|
| Linux, macOS | Yes | Yes. Jenkins can run anywhere but end user must assemble their own hardware and software stack |
| Windows, ARM | Yes. Via self-hosted agents | |
| Performance | |
|
| Guaranteed desktop-grade performance | Yes. In SaaS version
|
No. Depends on user’s choice and plugins |
| Autoscaling parallelism | Yes. Serverless model | No. Manually add/remove machines and installations to scale capacity |
| Allocate more CPUs and RAM to complex jobs | Yes. Change one line of configuration | No. Manually tweak plugins or upgrade machines to increase performance |
| Each job runs in a pristine, isolated environment | Yes | No. Jobs share disk space which may cause issues |
| Scalable dependency cache | Yes | No |
| Built-in artifacts store | Yes | No |
| Built-in Docker registry | Yes | No |
| Debugging feedback loop | Yes. Fast debugging via SSH access to both running and finished jobs | No. No direct SSH access to job environment, only log inspection |
| Permission management | |
|
| Mirror permissions from GitHub | Yes. Via official GitHub App | No. All users given full access by default |
| Role-based access | Yes. Admins can limit access to deployment, secrets | No. Manual setup of permissions |
| Okta / SAML for LDAP integration | No. Only SaaS version supports Okta | Yes. Okta / SAML for LDAP supported via plugin |
| Declarative configuration of permissions | No | No |
| Security | |
|
| Application-level security | Yes | No. Single-layer of security around the fleet of Jenkins machines |
| Runtime isolation | Yes | No. Additional security created must be created manually |
| IP allow list | Yes | No. Depends on end user configuration |
| Audit logs | Yes | Yes. Available via plugin |
| ISO 27001 certificate | Yes | No. No standard certification available, varying levels of security for OSS plugins, must be audited accordingly |
| SOC 2 certificate | No. Pending | No |
| Support | |
|
| Email-based account and technical support | Yes | No |
| Video call support | Yes | No |
| Support SLAs | Yes | No |
| Custom solution engineering | Yes | No |
| Dedicated customer success manager | Yes | No |
| Private Slack channel | Yes | No |
| Licensing model | ||
| SaaS subscription: Semaphore provides a typical cloud computing pay-as-you-go plan and Enterprise plans with per-seat price | Jenkins is open source and free to use, but lack of support and maintenance add to total cost of ownership |
“We eliminated waiting times at the end of each sprint, which were usually very challenging as we deploy a lot of changes on the last day, with Semaphore’s automatic CI scaling. We are now paying 38% of what we would be paying somewhere else and experience is great.”
Krzysztof Szromek, CTO @ Exlabs
Contact us for a demo and migration plan
“It may seem that Jenkins is cheaper than Semaphore. But, after a while, the benefits are very clear: your team becomes more efficient.”
César Luiz dos Anjos, CEO na Asseinfo
Case studies
These teams have switched from Jenkins to Semaphore. Discover their ROI:
