Depot CI
Hacker ApprovedShares rank 9 of 20 CI/CD services by recommenders
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.
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.
17 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 15
- criticize it
- 2
- approval share
- 88%
Recommended in 8 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 15 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 7.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 8 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Faster and cheaper than GitHub runners
“we immediately halved our CI costs and shed like 60% of the build time”
Comment from 2 Jan 2026 in “Can Bundler Be as Fast as Uv?” “where we offer our own faster and cheaper GitHub Actions runners”
Comment from 14 Jan 2026 in “I Hate GitHub Actions with Passion” “keep them cheaper than GitHub-hosted runners”
Comment from 16 Dec 2025 in “Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions” Happy long-term customers who stay
“I introduced Depot at my org a few months ago and I've been very happy with it.”
Comment from 26 Feb 2026 in “BuildKit: Docker's Hidden Gem That Can Build Almost Anything” “I've used Depot in the past and will stick with them where possible”
Comment from 10 Jun 2026 in “Surprise Pay $1000” “Having been a happy customer of Blacksmith, Depot, and Ubicloud”
Comment from 10 Jun 2026 in “Surprise Pay $1000” - Comment from 3 Mar 2026 in “GitHub Is Having Issues”
Good caching and registry locality
“helps a bunch with this by at least optimizing caching during build and ensuring the registry has high locality to the runner”
Comment from 23 Jan 2026 in “What Has Docker Become?” “Works well with depot.dev caches.”
Comment from 14 Dec 2025 in “Dagger: Define software delivery workflows and dev environments” Parallel steps built in
“Parallel steps is one of those things that unlocks a lot when it’s baked into the system.”
Comment from 28 Mar 2026 in “Now Available: Depot CI” “We've built a lot of cool stuff into it like parallel steps, custom images”
Comment from 26 May 2026 in “GitHub Actions down again today”
Other CI/CD services people recommend
The four most recommended other CI/CD services, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GitHub Actions | 234 | 741 | 24% | 12 | 2 yrs21 owners | — |
| Jenkins | 67 | 57 | 54% | 9 | — | — |
| GitLab CI | 56 | 25 | 69% | 11 | 3 yrs9 owners | Approved |
| Dagger | 43 | 23 | 65% | 10 | — | — |
| Depot CIThis page | 15 | 2 | 88% | 8 | — | Approved |
What people said
26 of the 29 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“If I buy a handful of bolts from McMaster or BoltDepot, I'm paying like $10 to ship”
“Depot CI as a general-purpose workflow engine that understands GitHub Actions as an input”
“the current state reads as Depot providing no improvement for zed”
“I've used Depot in the past and will stick with them where possible”
“Having been a happy customer of Blacksmith, Depot, and Ubicloud”
“Depot is the current front runner.”
“We have a real free trial that is time based that doesn’t do odd things like this.”
“Yes, we support this via Depot Managed for all of our products including the latest one”
“Yes, we support this via Depot Managed for all of our products”
“triggering Depot CI via the CLI is the sure fire way to avoid all dependencies on GitHub”
“the entire control plane is ours with our own engine”
“We've built a lot of cool stuff into it like parallel steps, custom images”
“Parallel steps is one of those things that unlocks a lot when it’s baked into the system.”
“Depot CI seems to have addressed this quite well”
“leaving seamless Sentry, Depot, Linear, editor plugins”
“at least use something nice like depot.dev for commercial ventures”
“I feel like Depot can be interesting for some private repositories github actions”
“Depot makes their CI so much better”
“I introduced Depot at my org a few months ago and I've been very happy with it.”
“helps a bunch with this by at least optimizing caching during build and ensuring the registry has high locality to the runner”
“where we offer our own faster and cheaper GitHub Actions runners”
“we immediately halved our CI costs and shed like 60% of the build time”
“keep them cheaper than GitHub-hosted runners”
“Depot isn't reliant on webhooks at all to run your jobs”
“Works well with depot.dev caches.”
“you pay $$$ for either something like Depot, or a beefy VM to host CI”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.