Semaphore is 30% faster and 30% cheaper than Github Actions

🔹 2× faster builds and smarter pipelines
🔹 Hands-on support from real CI/CD experts
🔹 No usage limits, better pricing, no surprises
🔹 Built for performance at scale
🔹 Get time back to build what matters

GitHub Actions vs. Semaphore: key differences

GitHub Actions pain 😖	Semaphore gain 🚀
🛠️ Hidden complexity in workflows	✅ Fast, optimized pipelines
⏳ Slow builds and job limits	⚡ Smart parallelism and flexible infrastructure
💥 Performance bottlenecks under load	📁 CI/CD as code with real-time debugging
🔍 Limited observability and debugging	🏗️ Auto-scaling, hybrid cloud or self-hosted
❌ Hard to scale across teams	🤝 Human support that helps you improve

See full comparison ⬇

From GitHub Actions to Semaphore: high performance, hands-on support, better pricing

GitHub Actions couldn’t keep up with our growing needs. Semaphore delivered faster builds, powerful parallelism, and hands-on support that helped us scale with confidence.

🚨 Before
Slow builds
Performance issues
Cost inefficiencies
Workflow friction

✅ After
8-minute test suites
Massive parallelization
Cost-optimized pipelines
Proactive support

✅ fast builds 8-minute test suites
✅ reduced costs

Ryan Clark

Engineering Leader for Infrastructure, Developer Experience, and Platform Services at BetterUp

Watch case study 🎬

Why teams choose Semaphore over GitHub Actions

Spend less time fighting CI, more time shipping code.

Keep your developers focused on product, not CI problems.

Consistent, scalable CI/CD for any team size.

Built for performance at any scale

GitHub Actions may work for simple tasks—but once you need performance, scale, and real support, Semaphore takes over.

✔️ No limits on parallelism or job queues 
✔️ Scale pipelines without rewriting workflows 
✔️ Proactive support from CI/CD experts

“Since moving to Semaphore from GitHub Actions, our CI pipeline has been stable and had more consistent run times, this allowed us to detect failures and flaky specs faster.”

Amin Ben Slimen

Senior Software Engineer

Read case study

Faster builds, better dev experience

Semaphore is optimized for speed and clarity. Teams switching from GitHub Actions ship faster and spend less time debugging builds.

✔️ Optimized parallel test execution 
✔️ Workflow visibility and real-time debugging 
✔️ Predictable performance under load

“It’s cheap, it’s easy to understand, and the support team is quick to assist if you need help. Honestly, after trying GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Octopus, Jenkins, and more, this clearly stands out to me as the better option.”

Fredrik August Madsen-Malmo

Head of DevOps at Kvist

One setup, multiple environments, total control

Avoid inconsistent setups across projects. Semaphore brings structure, flexibility, and control to teams working across any environment.

✔️ CI/CD as versioned code 
✔️ Runs across cloud, hybrid, and self-hosted 
✔️ Fine-grained permission control

“Semaphore is an incredibly easy-to-use CI/CD platform. Integrating my Ruby on Rails applications to use it is always very easy to do. Their platform has an incredibly good-looking UI, and documentation is also very well written.”

Lorenzo Zabot

Backend Engineer at Vox Group

🔍 Compare Semaphore Cloud and Community Edition 🆚 GitHub Actions

Semaphore Cloud

🌥️

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Saas

SaaS subscription model for cloud CI/CD, with pay-as-you-go and per-seat Enterprise plans.

Semaphore Community Edition

🌐

⭐⭐⭐

Open source

Open-Source and free to use. Must be installed on your hardware or cloud. Licensed under Apache 2 model.

GitHub Actions

🔒

⭐⭐

SaaS

GitHub Actions offers a SaaS pay-as-you-go model, but locks you into GitHub with fixed machine sizes and limited flexibility.

Full feature comparison

👉 Swipe to compare →

Features
Product type
SaaS
Hybrid: run agents on customer-managed infrastructure
Fully on-premises
Open source
Features
Graphical pipeline configuration
GitHub support
Bitbucket support
Gitlab support
Built-in rest reports
Built-in flaky test detection
Monorepo support
Debugging feedback loop
Command-line interface
Declarative configuration of services
Machine & Operating System support
Multiple machine types in cloud model
Linux
macOS
ARM
Windows
Continuous Delivery
Manage multiple deployment environments
Multi-stage releases
Automatic and manual promotions
Deployment dashboards
Parameterized promotions
Deployment queues
Performance
Top-of-market performance
Autoscaling parallelism
Allocate more CPUs and RAM to complex jobs
Scalable dependency cache
Built-in artifacts store
Built-in Docker registry
Security
Runtime isolation
IP allow list
Audit logs
ISO 27001 certificate
SOC 2 certificate
Role-based access
Okta / SAML for LDAP integration
Support
Email-based account and technical support
Video call support
Support SLAs
Custom solution engineering
Dedicated customer success manager
Private Slack channel
Community support via Discord

- 🌥️ Cloud
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  ⓘ SaaS with autoscaling resources
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  ⓘ Workflow Builder: point-and-click interface to create and edit pipelines
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  ⓘ Fast debugging via SSH access to both running and finished jobs.
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  ⓘ CLI can manage projects and do everything the UI can
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  ⓘ Supported via CLI
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  ⓘ Wide choice of CPU, memory, and disk space configurations
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  ⓘ Supported in self-hosted model
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  ⓘ Combine automatic steps with manual approval to ensure maximum reliability when delivering to users
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  ⓘ Chain pipelines together for any CD workflow (blue/green, canary, etc.)
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  ⓘ See which versions of all your applications have been deployed to which environment
- ✅
  ⓘ Define custom forms to parameterize CD pipelines
- ✅
  ⓘ Control which pipelines must run sequentially to prevent conflict and which may run in parallel
- ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
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  ⓘ 25%-100% faster than GitHub Actions workflows, depending on project
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  ⓘ Serverless model
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  ⓘ Change one line of configuration
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  ⓘ 9.6GB upgradeable on request, expires after 30 days
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- GitHub Actions
- ⭐⭐
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  ⓘ Hard limits on parallel jobs depending on plan
- ✅
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  ⓘ No direct SSH access to job environment, only log inspection.
- ❌
  ⓘ CLI limited to viewing workflow results
- ❌
- ⭐⭐⭐
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  ⓘ End user maintains the machines
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  ⓘ Max 5 parallel jobs on standard plans
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  ⓘ Supported in self-hosted model
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  ⓘ Supported in cloud and self-hosted models
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  ⓘ With hard limits depending on plan
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  ⓘ 10GB hard limit, expires after 7 days
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