Developer tools decision
CircleCI Performance
A small, single-team CI with basic runners and a UI is realistic to build and maintain; reproducing CircleCI Performance's scale, credits model, enterprise SLAs, and multi‑architecture resource classes is not practical for one person.
Visit website↗$15/mo
$180/yr
Per seat. Read off the official pricing page.
$50one-off30 h to build
$200/mo8 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 14 seats.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All CircleCI Performance alternatives, with the arithmetic →
Code CircleCI Performance publishes itself
Not a way out of the subscription - these are the vendor’s own repositories. Worth a look for how they build, and for anything you would have to integrate with.
What a replacement has to do
- Accept commits/webhooks → schedule job on a runner → provision container/VM and run build/test steps with caching → store artifacts/logs and report status
What it still won’t have
- Autoscaling and large multi-architecture resource classes out of the box
- Credits-driven billing, bulk-discounted prepaid credits model
- Enterprise support SLAs and optional 24/7 support add-ons
- Rich built-in feature set (orbs, insights, flaky-test detection, GPU runners) and high concurrency limits
What remains hard
- Brand trust
Join 2mil+ devs
- Infrastructure at scale
Industry-leading scale ensures you're equipped to meet any demand.
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 14 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal self-hosted CI service using: Go or Node backend, Postgres for state, Redis for queueing, Docker for runners, and a simple React UI. Implement: webhook receiver for Git commits, YAML pipeline parser (subset of CircleCI), job queue and scheduler, a runner that provisions Docker containers, step executor with artifact and log upload to S3, basic concurrency controls, a web UI and REST API for build status and logs. Out of scope: multi-architecture VM provisioning, prepaid credit billing, enterprise SSO, GPU runners. Include error handling, retries, and unit/integration tests, plus deployment scripts for a single AWS account (RDS, ECS or EC2 for runners, S3).
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Hard moats found in the evidence-3
- Evidence score64
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productCircleCI (home)
- official pricingCircleCI Pricing
- official docsCircleCI Product & features
- open sourceharness/harness
- open sourceconcourse/concourse
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
