# Buildhound vs Vercel Daemons

> Vercel Daemons run long-running Linux containers next to your app on Vercel, and name self-hosted CI runners as a use case. It is a public beta. Buildhound runs your jobs on machines you already have, each in a fresh VM.

## Choose Vercel Daemons when

- Your team already deploys its app on Vercel.
- You want Linux CI runners where you deploy, with no new vendor.
- A public beta's limits, which will likely change, fit your CI.

## Choose Buildhound when

- You have machines already, Macs included.
- Each job should get a fresh VM.
- Jobs at once should grow with every machine you connect, with new jobs routing to the healthy side when one is offline.

## Side by side

Vercel Daemons's side is from its own pages ([source](https://vercel.com/docs/daemons)), checked 16 October 2026.

### Price

| | Buildhound | Vercel Daemons |
| --- | --- | --- |
| How it is priced | Flat, 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. | No price published. For Daemons in the public beta; Hobby includes 10 vCPU-hours a month. |
| macOS | Your Mac. A fresh macOS VM per job; Apple allows two per Mac. | Not offered. |
| Linux | Your Mac or Linux box. A fresh Linux VM per job, arm64 on a Mac. | amd64 containers. Built from a Dockerfile in your project, up to 4 vCPUs and 8 GiB each. |
| Windows | Not yet. Windows jobs stay on GitHub-hosted. | Not offered. |

### Where it runs

| | Buildhound | Vercel Daemons |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Machines | Yours. A spare Mac, a Linux box, or a laptop while plugged in and not in use. | Vercel's servers. On Fluid compute, in the regions you pick. |
| Secrets | On your hardware. Only on a machine a person marked Trusted. | On Vercel's servers. With your deployment's environment variables. |

### When things change

| | Buildhound | Vercel Daemons |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Jobs at once | As many as your machines hold. Such as one macOS and one Linux job on a 24 GB Mac mini. When every machine is busy, new jobs go to GitHub-hosted after two and a half minutes. | A fixed number of instances. Set per region, with no autoscaling; Pro teams run up to 16 vCPUs at once. |
| Setup | One prompt to your coding agent. Or two commands by hand. | A Dockerfile and `vercel.json`. Production deployments only, not in a project whose root is a subfolder, and no runner guide yet. |

## One line in runs-on

Vercel documents no runner label or template for Daemons yet. Buildhound, on your machine while one can take the job and on GitHub-hosted when none can:

```yaml
runs-on: ${{ vars.BUILDHOUND_MACOS || 'macos-latest' }}
```

Buildhound has no referral agreement with Vercel Daemons. Source: https://buildhound.sh/compare/vercel-daemons.