Tekton is a cloud-native, Kubernetes-based CI/CD framework built on CRDs, while Jenkins is a traditional, plugin-driven automation server that runs as a standalone application. Tekton excels in containerized environments with declarative pipelines, whereas Jenkins offers broader ecosystem support and easier on-premise deployment.
Tekton vs Jenkins — Side-by-side comparison on A Versus B
Choose Tekton if your team runs Kubernetes-native infrastructure, values declarative GitOps-style pipelines, and wants tight container orchestration integration. Choose Jenkins if you need maximum plugin ecosystem flexibility, plan to run hybrid on-premise and cloud environments, or have teams unfamiliar with Kubernetes that require traditional web-based configuration.
Cloud-native CI/CD framework built on Kubernetes CustomResourceDefinitions.
Open-source automation server with extensive plugin ecosystem for CI/CD.
Structured comparison data for Tekton vs Jenkins with 143 attributes.
Setup Complexity (1-10, lower is easier)
Monthly Infrastructure Cost (10-developer team)
Monthly Cost (5 Users, Mid-Volume Usage)
Configuration Drift Auto-Detection Interval
Community Size (Stack Overflow Questions)
Tekton vs Jenkins — Attribute Category Vocabulary
Taxonomy of attribute categories used to classify comparison data for Tekton vs Jenkins.
Tekton is fully open-source with community support (Linux Foundation). Jenkins offers commercial support through CloudBees starting at ~$5,000/year for enterprise features.
Can I migrate existing Jenkins pipelines to Tekton?
There is no automatic migration tool. You'll need to rewrite Jenkinsfiles as Tekton YAML TaskRuns and PipelineRuns. The concepts differ significantly, making manual conversion necessary.
Tekton is generally faster due to lighter resource footprint and native container execution, while Jenkins overhead increases with plugin count. Speed difference is typically 10-30% in favor of Tekton in containerized environments.
No, Tekton is fundamentally built on Kubernetes CustomResourceDefinitions and requires an active K8s cluster to function. If you need CI/CD without Kubernetes, Jenkins is a better choice.
Which has better support for GitOps workflows?
Tekton is purpose-built for GitOps with declarative YAML pipelines stored in Git. Jenkins can support GitOps but requires more configuration and additional tools like ArgoCD to achieve the same workflow.