GitHub alternatives for startups in 2026: GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, Jenkins and other CI/CD tools

Three rows deserve a footnote. GitHub's free allowance is now a dollar amount ($12, $18 and $300 a month); the minute counts above are what that buys on a standard Linux runner, and our GitHub Actions pricing guide has the per-minute rates. CircleCI's figure assumes Linux medium at 10 credits a minute, the example on its pricing page. Buildkite counts vCPU minutes, so its allowance halves on a 2 vCPU machine. Bitbucket's minutes are for 1x steps; Atlassian's pricing page says a 5-minute step on a 2x runner counts as 10 build minutes.

Compare tiers, not only seat prices. GitHub's Free plan keeps rules and required reviewers to public repositories, GitLab needs Premium for merge request approval rules, and Bitbucket keeps enforced merge checks for Premium. If you are heading for SOC 2, compare the tier that enforces reviews, not the cheapest one.

Pros for a small team. The cheapest paid seat in the table. Jira links work without setup. Self-hosted runners are free: Atlassian's March 2026 runner announcement keeps up to 100 basic runners per workspace free, with only its new Premium runners billed, and its licensing FAQ says builds on self-hosted runners don't count towards build minutes.

Cons. Hosted minutes run out fast: at $10 per 1,000 extra minutes, Bitbucket's overage is about $0.010 a minute against GitHub's $0.006 on a 2-core runner. Bigger steps cost more: a 5-minute step on a 2x runner counts as 10 build minutes. Enforced merge checks, IP allowlisting and required two-step verification need Premium at $8. There is no data residency on Bitbucket Cloud yet. Atlassian's engineering blog of 5 March 2026 says EU residency in Frankfurt (eu-central-1) should arrive by the end of 2026; until it ships, plan as if it hasn't.

Bitbucket Data Center. Most Atlassian Data Center products reach end of life on 28 March 2029. Bitbucket and Bamboo Data Center are the exceptions: Atlassian says they "will not end of life", and existing customers get a Hybrid licence covering Data Center and Cloud. Atlassian's page also says new customers could no longer buy new Data Center subscriptions after 30 March 2026, and doesn't say whether that applies to Bitbucket. If you were planning a new Data Center install, ask Atlassian first.

SOC 2. Atlassian's SOC 2 page lists Bitbucket Cloud among the covered products; you accept an NDA to download the report.

Pick Bitbucket when the company is already on Jira and Confluence, you are happy on Premium, and either your CI is light or you will run self-hosted runners on AWS. Moving off it later is straightforward; see moving to GitHub.

How it's priced. The first 5 Basic users are free, then $6 a user. CI is priced by concurrency, not minutes. Once you link an Azure subscription for billing, private projects get one Microsoft-hosted job that runs up to 60 minutes at a time, with 1,800 minutes a month. Each paid Microsoft-hosted parallel job costs $40 a month with no minute limit and a 360-minute job limit. Self-hosted: one job free, then $15 per parallel job. Microsoft's rule of thumb is one parallel job per four or five users; a busy team will need more, because the jobs queue.

Pros. Low seat price. Branch policies can require reviewers, successful builds and status checks before a merge. Data can live in the UK or EU, and Azure DevOps has its own SOC 2 Type 2 report on Microsoft's Service Trust Portal. Boards and Test Plans are stronger than GitHub's equivalents if you use them. It reaches AWS without stored keys: the AWS Toolkit for Azure DevOps supports OIDC from version 1.15.0.

Cons. Fewer people outside large companies know it, so hiring and onboarding take longer, and most third-party tools document GitHub first. The residency has exceptions in Microsoft's own docs: personal access tokens and SSH keys are stored in a US datacenter, and builds on Microsoft-hosted macOS agents run in a GitHub datacenter in the US. Microsoft's roadmap still lists "Auditing GA" as a future item. Public projects are retired and convert to private in 2027.

Pick Azure DevOps when you are already on it, or you are a UK company that needs code held in the UK on a hosted plan and doesn't want to run anything. Otherwise GitHub, and moving from Azure DevOps to GitHub covers the switch.

Where Jenkins still wins. Builds that must run on hardware or networks no SaaS reaches, very long or unusual pipelines with years of shared libraries behind them, and teams that already have someone whose job includes Jenkins. If that's you, keep it, and put it in its own AWS account with agents that are destroyed after each build.

The credentials problem. On AWS, Jenkins agents normally get permissions from their EC2 instance role, so every job on that agent can do whatever the role allows. An OpenID Connect Provider plugin can issue per-build tokens that AWS accepts, but it is one more plugin to install, configure and patch. GitHub's OIDC model gives each job a token that AWS checks against a trust policy; GitHub's docs recommend conditioning on token.actions.githubusercontent.com:sub so only named repositories and branches can assume the deploy role. That difference is the one auditors and security reviews ask about.

Pick Jenkins when you can name the build only Jenkins can do. Otherwise move the jobs onto your Git host's CI; the steps are in moving to GitHub.

CircleCI vs GitHub Actions. On a 2-core Linux machine the per-minute cost is close: about $0.006 on both. The difference is the seat charge on top of GitHub's, and a second system for engineers to learn and for auditors to review. Choose CircleCI if a feature it has saves you real time; otherwise Actions avoids a vendor. Both issue OIDC tokens for AWS, and CircleCI's Trust Center offers its SOC 2 Type II report.

Buildkite. The model is the reverse of hosted CI: Buildkite runs the control plane, you run agents in your own AWS account, often on Spot instances. That keeps code and secrets inside your network and suits large monorepos and heavy test suites. At $30 a user it is the most expensive seat here, so it pays only when build volume is large. Agents can request OIDC tokens to assume AWS roles. Buildkite says it maintained its SOC 2 Type 2 report in 2024; ask for the current one.

Instance prices are On-Demand list, us-east-1, times 730 hours, checked 2 November 2026; they exclude disk, backups, load balancer and runners. Runners cost the same as for any self-hosted CI: about $72 a month for the example team's workload on ephemeral m7i.large instances (section 12).

Two cautions. Forgejo's docs say Forgejo Actions is "not designed to be compatible" with GitHub Actions and that "some minimal tweaking will most likely be necessary", so budget time for every workflow. And with any self-hosted Git server, the SOC 2 evidence is yours to produce: who has admin, how backups are tested, when it was patched.

Self-hosted GitLab cost and upkeep on AWS, including runners and backups, is covered in more depth in GitHub vs GitLab.

How to read it:

• Add people to the self-hosted rows. Jenkins, GitLab CE, Forgejo and every row with EC2 runners need patching, upgrades and the odd stuck queue. On our estimate that's 4 to 8 hours a month; at an illustrative $100 an hour, $400 to $800, which puts every self-hosted row above GitHub Team with hosted runners. Disk, backups, NAT and load balancers are not priced either.
• Azure DevOps is priced by concurrency. 37,074 minutes over 21 working days is about 29 hours of jobs a day, or nearly four jobs running at every moment of an 8-hour day. We assumed five paid parallel jobs to keep queues short; Microsoft's rule of thumb (one per four or five users) would give two, and this team would wait. With self-hosted agents instead: $18 + 4 extra jobs × $15 + $72.07 of EC2 = $150.07.
• Minutes don't translate exactly. GitHub rounds every job up to a whole minute; Buildkite bills per second; other vendors' rounding rules differ. Machine sizes differ too (GitLab's small runner, for example, has 2 vCPU and 8 GB), so check that each vendor's default machine is big enough for your build. Treat each row as within 10 to 20% either way.
• Startup programs can zero a year. A seed company accepted into GitLab for Startups gets Ultimate free for a year for up to 20 seats, and GitLab.com Ultimate lists 50,000 compute minutes, more than this team uses; confirm with GitLab that the program licence includes them. GitHub for Startups' $10,000 in credits would cover this team on Enterprise Cloud for the full 12 months they last: 8 seats at $21 is $168 a month, and 37,074 minutes fit inside Enterprise's $300 allowance.

At this size, the platform bill is small next to the AWS bill it deploys to (compare the profiles in how much AWS costs a startup). Choose on fit and on how little you have to run; cut minutes in the workflow files before you change vendor.

Answer these six questions in order and stop at the first yes. Most small teams on AWS reach the last one: GitHub Team with GitHub Actions.

1. Does a contract or regulator require code to stay in the UK or EU? Yes: Azure DevOps, GitLab Dedicated, GitHub Enterprise Cloud in the EU, or self-hosted on AWS in your region. No: carry on.
2. Are you already on a platform that works? Stay. Add OIDC to AWS, required reviews and an audit log export, and revisit in a year. Switching costs more than seats save at this size.
3. Must everything run in your own AWS account? GitLab self-managed if you want the full product and have someone to run it; GitHub with self-hosted runners or CodeBuild if only the builds must be inside.
4. Is the company already standardised on Jira and Confluence? Bitbucket Premium is reasonable. Otherwise GitHub.
5. Do you need one product for repos, CI, registry and security scanning, and will you pay $29 a seat for it? GitLab Premium, or Ultimate through the startup program while it lasts.
6. Everyone else: GitHub Team and GitHub Actions on hosted runners. Add self-hosted runners on AWS only past roughly 100,000 minutes a month on 2-core runners, or for jobs that need VPC access.