We've jumped ship to self-hosted Jenkins. Woodpecker CI looks cool but Jenkins seemed like a safer bet for us. It's been well worth the effort and it's simplified and sped up our CI massively.
Once we got the email that they were going to charge for self-hosted runners that was the final nail in the coffin for us. They walked it back but we've lost faith entirely in the platform and vision.
I don’t know what’s worse - in 2026 someone genuinely suggesting Jenkins as a viable GHA alternative, or me agreeing with that.
Jenkins has possibly the worst user experience of any piece of software I’ve had to use in the last few years. It’s slow, brittle, somehow both heavyweight and has no features, littered with security vulns due to architecture, is impossible to navigate, has absolutely no standardisation for usage.
Yep, I went through the exact same pains. We desperately wanted to move to something else and I kept steering us away from Jenkins as I'd experienced its pains at a previous role. We evaluated tons of different options and begrudgingly settled on Jenkins too.
CI is basically a glorified shell script executor with some env variable/credential injection. We don't use many of the plugins aside from the docker and the agent shell one.
I'm not sure I'm sold on this argument considering the docker image for GH Actions is made by "myoung34" and half the actions are community written, have terrible documentation and feel like abandonware too.
Once we got the email that they were going to charge for self-hosted runners that was the final nail in the coffin for us. They walked it back but we've lost faith entirely in the platform and vision.