Free your team from 
Jenkins’ slow builds, plugins, and maintenance with 
Semaphore.
- With Semaphore, you get:
- 🔹 No maintenance, no wasted time
- 🔹 Self-hosted (CE) or fully managed (Cloud)
- 🔹 Faster builds & optimized auto-scaling
- 🔹 More deployments, less CI/CD overhead
- 🔹 Free up developers for more valuable work
Jenkins vs. Semaphore: key differences
| Jenkins pain 😖 | Semaphore gain 🚀 |
|---|---|
| 🛠️ Complex setup & maintenance | ✅ Fully managed CI/CD (Cloud) or self-hosted (CE) |
| ⏳ Slow builds & bottlenecks | ⚡ Faster builds with smart optimizations |
| 💥 Fragmented team setups | 📁 Standardized CI/CD across teams |
| 🔄 Manual scaling & infrastructure overhead | 🏗️ Auto-scaling & hybrid cloud support |
| ❌ Outdated plugins & brittle pipelines | 🏆 Modern pipelines with CI/CD as code |
From Jenkins to Semaphore: faster builds, lower costs, no maintenance
Jenkins was slowing development—long queues, slow builds, and constant maintenance made shipping fast impossible. Semaphore eliminated the bottlenecks and made CI/CD effortless.
🚨 Before
⏳ 1-hour queues
🐢 30-minute builds
🔧 Manual scaling
💸 Uncontrolled costs
✅ After
⚡ 10-12 min builds
🚀 No queues
💰 20% cost savings
💬 Instant support
✅ Build times cut by 80-83%
✅ 20% cost savings with custom build triggers
Jenah Blitz
Software Engineer at Simply Business
Why teams choose Semaphore over Jenkins
No more CI/CD maintenance 💆♀️
Jenkins requires constant patching, scaling, and troubleshooting. With Semaphore:
- ✔️ No infrastructure headaches (Cloud)
- ✔️ Hybrid or self-hosted flexibility (CE)
- ✔️ Auto-scaling & managed security
📌 Less time fixing CI/CD, more time building.
“I’ve been doing CI/CD for more than 15 years. Semaphore is hands-down the best product I’ve used. An incredibly flexible platform, but without the open-ended bloat of Jenkins. It’s extremely intuitive and easy to navigate.”
Ben Peterson
Principal Software Engineer
Faster Builds, Faster Deployments 🚀
Semaphore is built for speed – teams switching from Jenkins save 500+ hours/month on:
- ✔ Faster parallel testing
- ✔️ Optimized pipelines
- ✔️ Unlimited on-demand capacity
📌 Your developers focus on shipping features, not waiting for builds.
“We eliminated waiting times at the end of each sprint, which were usually very challenging as we deploy a lot of changes on the last day, with Semaphore’s automatic CI scaling. We are now paying 38% of what we would be paying somewhere else and experience is great.”
Krzysztof Szromek
Cloud & Security Specialist
Standardized CI/CD, No Messy Setups 🌍
Jenkins setups are often messy and inconsistent across teams. Semaphore provides:
- ✔️ CI/CD as code (versioned, reusable)
- ✔️ Runs across multiple environments
- ✔️ Granular permission controls
📌 A single, reliable CI/CD setup for your entire org.
“It may seem that Jenkins is cheaper than Semaphore. But, after a while, the benefits are very clear: your team becomes more efficient.”
César Luiz dos Anjos
CEO
From Jenkins to Semaphore: Faster, Unified CI/CD for Confluent Platform Packaging
The team set out to reduce maintenance and improve developer experience by bringing all CI/CD workflows under one roof — with a single, scalable platform the entire company could rely on.
🚨 Before
🐌 7.5h builds
⏳ 35h releases
🔧 Monolithic pipelines
💸 High infra cost
✅ After
⚡ 2.5h builds
🚀 8h releases
🧩 Modular & efficient
📉 50% fewer resources
✅ 65-70% faster build times
✅ 77% reduction in release time
Sneha Wadhwa
Senior Software Engineer at Confluent
🔍 Compare Semaphore Cloud and Community Edition 🆚 Jenkins
👀 at a glance 👇
📋 Full feature comparison
👉 Swipe to compare →
- Features
- Product type
- SaaS
- Hybrid
- Fully on-premises
- Features
- Standard project set up in a few clicks
- GitHub support
- Bitbucket support
- Gitlab support
- Standardized product
- Graphical pipeline configuration
- Standardized configuration language
- Command-line interface
- Dashboards
- Test reports
- Flaky test detection
- Monorepo support
- Promotions
- Preflight checks
- Parameterized promotions
- Deployment targets
- Ease of Maintenance
- No maintenance required for hardware
- No maintenance required for platform software
- No maintenance required for user-facing product
- Declarative configuration of services
- Hot upgrades without downtime
- Operating system support
- Linux, macOS
- Windows, ARM
- Performance
- Guaranteed desktop-grade performance
- Autoscaling parallelism
- Allocate more CPUs and RAM to complex jobs
- Each job runs in a pristine, isolated environment
- Scalable dependency cache
- Built-in artifacts store
- Built-in Docker registry
- Debugging feedback loop
- Permission management
- Mirror permissions from GitHub
- Role-based access
- Okta / SAML for LDAP integration
- Declarative configuration of permissions
- Security
- Application-level security
- Runtime isolation
- IP allow list
- Audit logs
- ISO 27001 certificate
- SOC 2 certificate
- Support
- Email-based support
- Video call support
- Support SLAs
- Custom solution engineering
- Dedicated customer success manager
- Private Slack channel
- Community support via Discord
📈 Real-world success: how companies made the switch
These teams have switched from Jenkins to Semaphore. Discover their ROI.
“Semaphore allows us to build anywhere from two to twenty branches in parallel, each one in a threaded environment. We had thousands of tests that were running for a really long time and with Semaphore we got the build to run in under 20 minutes.”
Artem Lypiy
QA Lead at 500px
“Semaphore 2.0 allows us to build, tag, push, and run Docker images easily. This makes building a powerful pipeline where we can deploy to our Kubernetes cluster fairly easily and quickly.”
Nic Cavigliano
Senior Software Engineer
