# Jenkins

67 Hacker News commenters recommended Jenkins and 57 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Free, self-hosted build server valued for flexibility and scripted pipelines; the common caveat is plugin upkeep and a clunky user experience.

## Why people recommend it

- Flexible, fast, free CI system (2 comments): "its the most flexible and fastest CI system I have ever used" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46910023)) "Feels like using a free Jenkins gets you everything you want." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151200))
- Simple, clear pipeline setup (2 comments): "simple and clear pipelines setup that autobuild any branch we want" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46305757)) "Nice and simple (even if the scripts sometimes got insane)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49333611))
- Redacts secrets and parses logs (2 comments): "It parsed the log output with regular expressions and presented new warnings and errors in a nice table." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46909858)) "Jenkins CI has a clever feature where every password it injects will be redacted if printed to stdout" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47137057))
- Preferred over GitHub Actions (2 comments): "Anyone who has ever used Gitlab, or dare my foul mouth say Jenkins, has experienced a better system than Github actions." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46066863)) "You can do a lot more than GitHub actions with a lot less complexity than Jenkins." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50228109))

## What people warn about

- Poor, janky user experience (3 comments): "everything is kinda janky on Jenkins, but everything falls into an expectable corridor of jank you get used to" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46293825)) "Jenkins has possibly the worst user experience of any piece of software I've had to use in the last few years." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47493394)) "My experience with any tool that offers non-developer UI for developer-related activities was overall infuriatingly negative" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48158611))
- Pre-container design runs on builders (2 comments): "biggest flaw of jenkins is that by default it runs on builder env, as it was made pre-container era" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46910542)) "Jenkins was just build in pre-container way so a lot of stuff" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137395))
- Hard to maintain over time (3 comments): "it was far more stable, but a pain to maintain and understand" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46292378)) "It is overwhelmingly less resource-intensive to maintain over time than any Jenkins server." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618086)) "we needed to maintain our own jenkins infrastructure for CI/CD" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50058973))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [GitHub Actions](https://hackerapproved.com/p/github-actions.md): 234 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
- [Buildkite](https://hackerapproved.com/p/buildkite.md): 33 recommend

## Cite as

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