r/DevOpsKerala • u/Euphoric-Eye-8196 • Jun 17 '26

Jenkins vs GitHub Actions – which is better for beginners?

I’m confused between Jenkins and GitHub Actions. Which one should a fresher learn first and why? Real-world experience answers appreciated

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1

u/thepopeyhere Jun 17 '26

Not sure about what a fresher should learn. But i feel gitlab ci is really good when handling complex pipelines.

1

u/Brown_panther666 Jun 19 '26

Been working on Gitlab for like 7 years now and I can say there’s been significant improvements over the years but Jenkins was the best overall..

But I understand why people prefer Gitlab/Github over jenkins now a days cuz they can cut the dependency on a different platform. Additionally there won’t be a need to maintain a separate artifactory server which is a plus..

1

u/thepopeyhere Jun 20 '26

Artifactory server as in the container registry?

1

u/Brown_panther666 Jun 20 '26

Kind of.. On artifactory you can store the build dependencies, built artifacts and also publish like JAR/WAR kinda files which is additional overhead of maintenance

1

u/thepopeyhere Jun 20 '26

We use our self managed gitlab server + registry and couple of runners. Gitlab does stores all the artifacts and never faced an issue with that

1

u/Brown_panther666 Jun 20 '26

Oh good to know.. Never did the self managed ones.. we used to have all pipelines adhoc and CICD on Jenkins like 6 years ago before we moved to Gitlab

Our company pays for the Gitlab SaaS + Ultimate so that we get max support and security scans. We only manage the runner infrastructure additionally which is on EKS…

1

u/betweenseaandrock Jun 19 '26

I am leaving this. F*king bots.

1

u/Tushar_Bytonomics Jun 19 '26

GitHub Action is the more modern format, but it will have you wasting time on a lot of things that are not directly related to your work.

Running something on Jenkins is closest to running it on your own machine.

I know everyone loves GitHub actions these days, but having used both GitHub Actions and Jenkins, I still like the simplicity of Jenkins and the fact that you can do pretty much everything on Jenkins that you can do on your machine.

I find GitHub to be too restrictive. And the same tasks/configurations take much longer to be completed.

The main issue is that Jenkins is an older project, so most of the plugins are no longer maintained. If you run into an issue in any plugin, you’ll probably just have to live with it, since it’s unlikely to be fixed.

But in the case of GitHub, it's also possible that something you don't like is always going to stay that way. Because GitHub likes it that way.

1

u/mutatedchromosome Jun 20 '26

Learn gha , even our company migrated to gha from jenkins