# Depot CI

15 Hacker News commenters recommended Depot CI and 2 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 8 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Hosted CI service people use as a faster, cheaper GitHub Actions runner with caching and parallel steps. One critic calls it costly next to a self-hosted VM.

## Why people recommend it

- Faster and cheaper than GitHub runners (3 comments): "we immediately halved our CI costs and shed like 60% of the build time" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46461340)) "where we offer our own faster and cheaper GitHub Actions runners" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618577)) "keep them cheaper than GitHub-hosted runners" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46293093))
- Happy long-term customers who stay (4 comments): "I introduced Depot at my org a few months ago and I've been very happy with it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47173307)) "I've used Depot in the past and will stick with them where possible" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48476265)) "Having been a happy customer of Blacksmith, Depot, and Ubicloud" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48475720))
- Good caching and registry locality (2 comments): "helps a bunch with this by at least optimizing caching during build and ensuring the registry has high locality to the runner" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46734842)) "Works well with depot.dev caches." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46265031))
- Parallel steps built in (2 comments): "Parallel steps is one of those things that unlocks a lot when it’s baked into the system." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47552917)) "We've built a lot of cool stuff into it like parallel steps, custom images" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48278805))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [GitHub Actions](https://hackerapproved.com/p/github-actions.md): 234 recommend
- [Jenkins](https://hackerapproved.com/p/jenkins.md): 67 recommend
- [GitLab CI](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gitlab-ci.md): 56 recommend
- [Dagger](https://hackerapproved.com/p/dagger.md): 43 recommend
- [Woodpecker CI](https://hackerapproved.com/p/woodpecker-ci.md): 37 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://depot.dev/)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Depot CI", https://hackerapproved.com/p/depot/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).