TL;DR: A pipeline sitting in queue for 45 minutes while we're mid-sprint is what finally broke me. Not 5 minutes.

📖 Reading time: ~37 min

What's in this article

The Moment I Started Looking for Alternatives

The Current Stack I Landed On (Spoiler: It's Not One Tool)

GitHub Actions — The Obvious One You Should Probably Just Use

Woodpecker CI — The Self-Hosted Option That Doesn't Make You Hate Yourself

Jenkins — I Know, I Know. But Hear Me Out.

Forgejo Actions — If You're Already Self-Hosting Your Git

Side-by-Side Comparison — What Actually Matters

When to Pick What — Match the Tool to Your Situation

The Moment I Started Looking for Alternatives

A pipeline sitting in queue for 45 minutes while we're mid-sprint is what finally broke me. Not 5 minutes. Not 15. Forty-five minutes on a shared runner, waiting for a Docker build to start, while my team is asking if the staging deploy is done yet. That's not a CI system doing its job — that's a CI system actively slowing you down.…