Github Actions

GitHub Actions is free for all public repositories with unlimited minutes and storage. For private repositories, GitHub includes free minutes based on plan: Free (2,000 min/month), Pro ($4/month, 3,000 min), Team ($4/user/month, 3,000 min shared), Enterprise ($21/user/month, 50,000 min). Additional minutes are billed at $0.008/min (Linux), $0.016/min (Windows), $0.08/min (macOS). Storage for Actions artifacts starts free (500 MB on Free plan). Most small-to-medium teams find the included minutes sufficient — 2,000 minutes handles roughly 400 five-minute builds per month. Organizations with large test suites or frequent deployments often hit limits and pay overages or move to self-hosted runners.

For new projects on GitHub, Actions is almost always the better choice: zero server setup, native GitHub PR integration, simple YAML syntax, 15,000+ marketplace actions, and automatic security updates. Jenkins is better when you need: on-premises hosting for compliance reasons, complex custom pipelines leveraging specific Jenkins plugins not available in Actions, or when you're not on GitHub (Jenkins is VCS-agnostic). The migration from Jenkins to Actions is significant for complex pipelines but well worth it for teams spending time maintaining Jenkins infrastructure. For greenfield projects, GitHub Actions is the clear default; for established Jenkins shops, evaluate migration ROI before switching.

GitHub Actions runners are the compute environments where workflow jobs execute. GitHub provides hosted runners (you don't manage them): ubuntu-latest, ubuntu-22.04, ubuntu-20.04, windows-latest, windows-2022, macos-latest, macos-14 (Apple Silicon), and others. Hosted runners have 2–4 CPU cores, 7–14 GB RAM, and 14 GB SSD by default. Larger hosted runners (16–64 cores, up to 192 GB RAM) are available on Team/Enterprise plans. Self-hosted runners let you run workflows on your own infrastructure — useful for accessing internal network resources, using specialized hardware (GPU machines for ML), or running jobs that exceed hosted runner limits. Self-hosted runners can run on any machine that can install the GitHub Actions runner application.