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Buildhound vs Buildkite

Buildkite is a CI service with its own pipelines: its agents run on your machines, or on its hosted machines by the minute, with a fee per user. Buildhound runs your GitHub Actions workflows on machines you already have, for a flat price per machine.

Set up by hand

What a month costs

Minutes a month
  • Buildhound Teamone machine you already have$24
  • GitHub-hostedmacos-latest, list price$310
  • BuildkiteHosted M4 Medium, 6 vCPU, list price, at least the $30 plan$600

One Mac you already have costs $24 a month on Team. Buildkite costs $600, and GitHub-hosted $310.

List prices, before free minutes or credits on either side. One machine runs these minutes a job at a time; Personal is $10 a machine on a personal account.

Choose the one that fits

Choose Buildkite when

  • You run a large monorepo and want pipelines generated as they run.
  • You want CI agents on your own machines at any scale, with Buildkite running the rest.
  • Your team is moving off GitHub Actions anyway.

Choose Buildhound when

  • Your CI already lives in GitHub Actions.
  • You want your machines with GitHub-hosted as the fallback, without a fee per user.
  • You want a fresh VM for every job on the machines you have.

Side by side

Buildkite from its own pages, checked 17 October 2026

Two ways to run the same workflow
Clean runners on machines you already have$24a machine a month on Team
BuildkitePipelines on your agents or its hosted ones$0.12a hosted M4 Medium minute

Price

How it is priced
BuildhoundFlat, per machine$10 a machine a month on a personal account, $24 in an organisation, counted only on days it runs a job. Public repositories free.
BuildkitePer user, plus hosted minutes$30 per active user a month on Pro; hosted agents by the minute; your own agents included up to the plan's limit.
macOS
BuildhoundYour MacA fresh macOS VM per job; Apple allows two per Mac.
Buildkite$0.12 a minuteHosted M4 Medium, 6 vCPU, or your own Mac as an agent.
Linux
BuildhoundYour Mac or Linux boxA fresh Linux VM per job, arm64 on a Mac.
Buildkite$0.008 a minuteHosted Small, 2 vCPU, or your own machine as an agent.
Windows
BuildhoundNot yetWindows jobs stay on GitHub-hosted.
BuildkiteYour own agentsIts hosted agents are Linux and macOS.

Where it runs

Machines
BuildhoundYoursA spare Mac, a Linux box, or a laptop while plugged in and not in use.
BuildkiteYour machines or Buildkite's

When things change

Setup
BuildhoundOne prompt to your coding agentOr two commands by hand.
BuildkitePipelines and the agentBuildkite's own pipeline files, not GitHub Actions.

One line in runs-on

Buildkite pipelines run on Buildkite agents from its own pipeline files, not from runs-on in GitHub Actions.

Buildhoundruns-on: ${{ vars.BUILDHOUND_MACOS || 'macos-latest' }}The job runs on your machine while one can take it, and on GitHub-hosted when none can.

Put the machines you already have to work.

A spare Mac, a Linux box, or the laptop you code on while it is plugged in and not in use. One prompt into Claude Code, Codex or Cursor: Linux jobs run within minutes, macOS jobs once the Mac has built its image.

Set up by hand
  • The Buildhound agent holds no GitHub credential
  • A fresh VM per job, off your network
  • Your agent prepares, you approve
  • How security works