Semaphore is still running and has opened up. In March 2025 the company announced that its core platform is open source under Apache 2.0. There are now three editions: a free Community Edition you host, the managed Semaphore Cloud, and an on-premise Enterprise Edition whose extra code sits under a commercial licence.
Semaphore Cloud is billed by usage. The Semaphore pricing page gives every account $15 of free credits a month, about 2,000 minutes on a 2 vCPU Ubuntu machine, and 20 concurrent jobs by default. Paid support and success plans are monthly add-ons from $50. People searching for alternatives usually want lower per-minute rates, free self-hosted runners, or CI tied to their Git host. The picks are ordered by how closely they match Semaphore's hosted, YAML-first model. Prices are in US dollars.
Prices below are as of November 8, 2026. Our method is on How we review tools.
Quick comparison
| Tool | Best for | Price | Platforms |
|---|---|---|---|
| CircleCI | The closest hosted match, with credits and test splitting | Free 30,000 credits; Performance from $15/month | Linux, Windows, macOS, Arm; self-hosted runners |
| GitHub Actions | Repos on GitHub and free self-hosted runners | Free allowance; Linux $0.006/minute | Linux, Windows, macOS; self-hosted |
| Buildkite | Your own agents with a hosted dashboard | Free up to 5 users; Pro $30 per active user/month | Self-hosted agents; hosted Linux, macOS, Windows |
| GitLab CI/CD | CI, Git hosting and registry in one | Free; Premium $29 per user/month, yearly | GitLab.com, self-managed |
| Woodpecker CI | Free self-hosted CI on a small server | Free (Apache 2.0) | Linux, Docker, self-hosted |
| Travis CI | Flat-rate unlimited builds | From $15/month; Unlimited from $78/month | Linux, Windows, macOS; Server edition |
CircleCI
Semaphore users will feel at home in CircleCI. Both use YAML pipelines with parallel jobs, caching, test splitting and per-job machine types, and both bill hosted time as usage. CircleCI adds Windows and a wider choice of Docker, VM and Arm resource classes, plus orbs, its packaged config snippets.
The CircleCI pricing page gives the free plan 30,000 credits a month, 5 active users and 30 concurrent jobs. A Linux Medium machine uses 10 credits a minute, and extra credits cost $15 per 25,000, which works out to $0.006 a minute against Semaphore's $0.0075 for 2 vCPU Ubuntu x64.
Best for: Teams that want Semaphore's hosted model with a larger free allowance.
Pricing:
- Free: $0, 30,000 credits a month, 5 active users
- Performance: from $15 per month, billed monthly; $15 per extra 25,000 credits
- Scale: custom, billed annually
Watch out for:
- Free credits do not roll over. Unused credits expire at the end of each month.
- Free macOS concurrency is 1 job, against 30 for Linux.
Official site: CircleCI.
GitHub Actions
GitHub Actions removes the separate CI account, because builds run where the code lives. The biggest difference for a Semaphore user is self-hosted pricing: GitHub's Actions billing docs list self-hosted runners as free, while Semaphore charges $0.0025 a minute for them.
Hosted minutes come out of a monthly allowance: $12 of compute on Free, about 2,000 Linux minutes, and $18 on Team, about 3,000 Linux minutes. A 2-core Linux runner costs $0.006 a minute, Windows $0.010 and macOS $0.062.
Best for: Teams on GitHub, especially those with their own build machines.
Pricing:
- Free: $12 of compute a month, about 2,000 Linux minutes
- Team: $4 per user per month, $18 of compute, about 3,000 Linux minutes
- Enterprise: $21 per user per month, $300 of compute, about 50,000 Linux minutes
- Self-hosted runners: free
Watch out for:
- Semaphore's Arm machines are cheaper. Its 2 vCPU Ubuntu ARM rate of $0.003 a minute is below GitHub's $0.005 for a 2-core Linux arm64 runner.
- It only builds repositories hosted on GitHub.
Official site: GitHub Actions.
Buildkite
Buildkite fits teams that liked Semaphore's speed but want builds on their own hardware. Agents run in your cloud account or data centre, and Buildkite hosts only the scheduler, UI and logs. Pipelines can be generated on the fly by a script, which helps large monorepos.
The Buildkite pricing page lets 5 users run up to 10 concurrent jobs for free. Pro is $30 per active user per month with 10 agents included and $3.50 per extra agent. Hosted Linux runs $0.004 per vCPU minute, so a 2 vCPU machine costs $0.008.
Best for: Engineering teams that run their own build fleet and want a hosted control plane.
Pricing:
- Free: $0, up to 5 users, 10 concurrent jobs
- Pro: $30 per active user per month, up to 50 users, $3.50 per extra agent a month
- Enterprise: custom, 30-user minimum
Watch out for:
- Pro is billed per active user, so a 20-person team pays $600 a month before compute, where Semaphore charges no seat fee.
Official site: Buildkite.
GitLab CI/CD
Moving to GitLab replaces both Semaphore and the Git host. Pipelines, merge requests, a container registry and security scanning share one permission model, and runners can be self-hosted at no charge. Like Semaphore, GitLab can be used as SaaS on GitLab.com or installed on your own servers.
The GitLab pricing page includes 400 compute minutes a month on Free, 10,000 on Premium and 50,000 on Ultimate. Premium costs $29 per user per month, billed annually, and extra minutes are $10 per 1,000.
Best for: Teams ready to move code hosting as well as CI.
Pricing:
- Free: $0, 400 compute minutes a month, 5 users per private group on GitLab.com
- Premium: $29 per user per month, billed annually
- Ultimate: contact sales
- Extra minutes: $10 per 1,000
Watch out for:
- Self-managed GitLab needs 8 vCPU and 16 GB of RAM as its single-node baseline, per the install requirements.
- The free tier's 400 minutes is far below Semaphore's roughly 2,000 free Ubuntu minutes.
Official site: GitLab CI/CD.
Woodpecker CI
Woodpecker is a small, community-run CI server under Apache 2.0. Pipelines are YAML files where each step runs in a container, and it connects to Forgejo, Gitea, GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket. The idle server uses about 100 MB of RAM and an agent about 30 MB, with SQLite as the default database.
It is a lighter self-hosted option than Semaphore's Community Edition, which installs on Ubuntu or Kubernetes. The releases page lists 3.18.1 from September 8, 2026. Woodpecker began in 2019 as a fork of Drone, and our Drone alternatives page covers that family.
Best for: Self-hosters who want CI with no usage bill on a small VM.
Pricing:
- Free, Apache 2.0 licence
- No paid edition or hosted plan
Watch out for:
- There is no vendor support contract. Help comes from the community and the docs.
- Caching comes from plugins and volumes, not a managed cache like the 9.6 GB per project Semaphore Cloud includes.
Official site: Woodpecker CI.
Travis CI
Travis CI is still in business on travis-ci.com, though the old travis-ci.org was set to sunset on May 31, 2021, ending the era of free unlimited open source builds. Its draw today is the flat-rate Unlimited plan, which removes per-minute budgeting for non-premium VMs.
Travis CI's Usage Based plan costs $15 a month with 35,000 Linux build credits, or $13.75 a month billed annually with 420,000 credits a year. Unlimited starts at $78 a month, or $72 a month on annual billing, with 1 to 300 concurrent jobs. A self-hosted Server edition starts at $34 a month.
Best for: Teams that prefer a fixed monthly CI bill over per-minute pricing.
Pricing:
- Usage Based: $15 per month, or $13.75 per month billed annually
- Unlimited: from $78 per month, or $72 per month billed annually
- Server: from $34 per month
Watch out for:
- The Usage Based plan charges per user on top of credits, so seat costs grow with the team.
- The flat rate covers non-premium VMs only, so macOS and larger machines are still billed on top.
Official site: Travis CI.
How to choose
| If you need | Pick |
|---|---|
| Semaphore's hosted model with more free credits | CircleCI |
| Free self-hosted runners and code on GitHub | GitHub Actions |
| A hosted dashboard for your own build fleet | Buildkite |
| Replace CI and the Git host together | GitLab CI/CD |
| Free CI on a small self-hosted VM | Woodpecker CI |
| A flat monthly bill with unlimited builds | Travis CI |
When to stay with Semaphore CI
Stay on Semaphore if you build a lot on Arm. Its 2 vCPU Ubuntu ARM machines cost $0.003 a minute, cheaper than any 2-vCPU hosted Linux rate here, and there is no per-user fee. If the hosted bill is the problem, the Apache 2.0 Community Edition on GitHub keeps the same pipeline format on your own Ubuntu server or Kubernetes cluster, which is less work than rewriting every pipeline.
Frequently asked questions
Is Semaphore CI open source?
Partly. The core platform is the Community Edition under Apache 2.0. Enterprise Edition features live in an ee/ directory under a commercial licence, and Semaphore Cloud is a paid managed service.
Is Semaphore CI free?
The self-hosted Community Edition is free. On Semaphore Cloud, each account gets $15 of free credits a month, about 2,000 minutes on a 2 vCPU Ubuntu x64 machine, and usage above that is billed per minute.
What is a good self-hosted alternative to Semaphore?
Woodpecker CI is free and light enough for a small VM. Jenkins and TeamCity suit teams that want a mature server with a web UI, and we compare those on our TeamCity alternatives page. GitHub Actions and GitLab also run on your own runners at no extra cost.
Is Semaphore cheaper than GitHub Actions?
For Arm, yes: $0.003 a minute on Semaphore against $0.005 for GitHub's 2-core Linux arm64 runner. For x64, GitHub is cheaper at $0.006 against $0.0075, and its self-hosted runners are free while Semaphore charges $0.0025 a minute.
