Ship 2× faster than GitHub Actions — without leaving GitHub.
Semaphore averages 5m 01s vs GitHub Actions’ 9m 44s on the same workload — 94% faster, at $0.04/job vs $0.06. Keep your repos, PRs, and reviews on GitHub. Just swap the CI underneath.
Why teams leave GitHub Actions for Semaphore
Not “a nicer GitHub Actions” — a faster, more reliable, more affordable CI that still lives inside GitHub.
Roughly 2× faster builds
Same repo, same machine class — Semaphore finishes in about half the time. Faster feedback, shorter PR-to-merge.
5m 01s vs 9m 44s · 94% fasterReliability you can deploy on
No more “we can’t ship for days because CI is down.” Stable, reproducible runs, a production-identical pre-push sandbox, and built-in flaky-test detection.
Reproducible runs · flaky-test detectionLower cost, no “cloud tax”
$0.04/job vs $0.06 — and because pipelines finish faster, you burn fewer billed minutes. Pay-as-you-go, no per-seat fees, no idle costs.
$15 free/mo · pay only for what you runTell your agent what you want. It runs your CI.
Semaphore is the CI built for coding agents. Through its MCP server and Claude Code + Codex plugins, your agent sets up CI, inspects runs, debugs failures, and re-triggers jobs — natively. GitHub Actions has nothing like it.
- ✓ MCP server: agents read logs & test output programmatically
- ✓ Agent sets up and maintains your pipeline as code grows
- ✓ Fully open source — read it, run it, self-host it
- ✓ Scoped secrets & job isolation for safe agent access
Migration isn’t a project. It’s one command.
The biggest reason teams stay on GitHub Actions is the fear of migrating. So we made your coding agent do it. Point it at your repo and it translates your existing workflows to Semaphore for you.
See what slow CI is costing you
Based on the benchmark: GitHub Actions ran ~2× slower on the same workload. Drag to match your team.
Assumes Semaphore completes the same workload ~48% faster (5m 01s vs 9m 44s benchmark). Illustrative — run it on your own repo for exact numbers.
The differences that actually matter
The five things teams tell us tip the decision. Full feature matrix below if you want every row.
| What you care about | Semaphore | GitHub Actions |
|---|---|---|
| Avg build time (benchmark) | 5m 01s | 9m 44s |
| Cost per job | $0.04 · pay-as-you-go | $0.06 · minutes add up |
| Parallelism | No limits, autoscaling | Capped by plan (max ~5 std) |
| Debugging | SSH into jobs + real-time logs | Log inspection only |
| Agent-native + open source | Yes — MCP, self-hostable | No |
Questions teams ask before switching
No. Semaphore connects to your existing GitHub repositories. Your code, pull requests, and reviews stay exactly where they are — you’re only replacing the CI that runs behind them.
Minimal. Semaphore’s agent tooling (Claude Code + Codex plugins) translates your existing GitHub Actions workflows for you. Most teams are running their first Semaphore build the same day.
Yes. At $0.04/job vs $0.06 and roughly half the runtime, you pay for fewer billed minutes. On a workload that takes 1M build minutes on Semaphore, GitHub Actions needs an estimated 1.94M — plus the engineer-hours lost waiting.
SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified, with SAML/Okta SSO, role-based access control, audit logs, managed secrets, and 24/7 support with SLAs.
Can I self-host?
Yes. Semaphore is fully open source (Apache 2.0). Run the Community Edition on your own hardware using the same YAML as the cloud — or use hybrid, with agents on your infrastructure.
EASY MIGRATION
Outgrown Github Actions?
Keep your repos on GitHub.
Swap in CI that’s 2× faster, cheaper, and built for coding agents.
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/semaphoreio/sem-ai/main/install.sh | sh/plugin marketplace add semaphoreio/sem-ai/plugin install sem-ai@semaphoreiocodex plugin marketplace add semaphoreio/sem-aicodex plugin add sem-ai@semaphoreio.. then ask your agent “migrate my Github Actions workflows to Semaphore”