Blacksmith alternatives for GitHub Actions, priced and ranked

By Daniel Zoghalchali·Latchkey

The Blacksmith alternatives GitHub Actions teams shortlist are the six other vendors that answer a runs-on label, and they are ranked here by the Linux rate each one published on 2026-09-20 at 2 vCPU. Blacksmith itself sits mid-table at $0.004 for Ubuntu x64 and $0.0025 for ARM, so the question is never only price: it is whether you are leaving for the rate, for a billing model Blacksmith does not publish, or for an operating system it charges a premium on.

Blacksmith is a genuinely good product and the honest starting point is what it does well. Its pitch, in its own words rather than any benchmark run here, is a high single-core clock on its own metal: the buy when one compile or bundle step is your critical path. It includes 3,000 free minutes a month on every plan card, the most generous standing allowance here. Its ARM card at $0.0025 undercuts every other ARM rate here except Namespace at $0.002, and buys 6 GB at 2 vCPU: Blacksmith publishes arm64 at 3 GB per vCPU, so there is no 8 GB ARM card.

The three reasons teams look past it are specific. Ubuntu x64 at $0.004 a minute is mid-table now rather than cheap. Docker layer caching and sticky disks are add-ons at $0.50 per GB per month rather than included, so the effective rate for a Docker-heavy pipeline is above the card. And billing granularity is published nowhere, on the pricing page or in the docs, which is the row that decides a wide matrix of short jobs.

The ranking criterion below is the published Linux x64 rate at 2 vCPU for a private repository, read on 2026-09-20, with the memory that rate buys next to it. Every alternative here is a runs-on label change, so the cost of getting this wrong is a revert commit.

Every alternative, ranked by published Linux rate

A shortlist, not the field: Blacksmith itself and the four its users move to. Ubicloud for the rate, Namespace for cores per dollar, Latchkey for re-run waste, Depot for a Docker cache included rather than billed per GB. WarpBuild and RunsOn are in the next table, and all eight are priced side by side in the roundup. Against each vendor's cheapest card, Blacksmith ARM at $0.0025 is joint third here and its x64 at $0.004 fourth.

What each alternative has that Blacksmith does not

The rate is one column of eleven. These are the rest, written against Blacksmith, with the full eight-vendor matrix in GitHub Actions runner alternatives.

If you are leaving for the rate: Ubicloud or Namespace

Ubicloud publishes the lowest Linux rate here, $0.0012 a minute for 2 vCPU with 8 GB on AMD EPYC Genoa and $0.0020 on Ryzen 9, with 1,250 free minutes and 30 GB of cache storage included. Against Blacksmith Ubuntu x64 that is a 70% cut at the same memory. What it lacks is everything Blacksmith sells beyond Linux: no Windows, no macOS, no ARM shape, and no published billing granularity or concurrency ceiling.

Namespace is cheaper again at $0.002 a minute, but only for a 2 vCPU runner with 4 GB. Its 8 GB shape is $0.004, level with Blacksmith x64, because it bills in unit minutes where a unit is 1 vCPU and 2 GB. It publishes a Linux concurrency ceiling of 32, 64 or 160 vCPU by plan where Blacksmith publishes no limit, and it has no standing free allowance.

If you are leaving for Docker: Depot

Blacksmith charges $0.50 per GB per month for Docker layer caching and the same again for sticky disks. Depot bundles remote BuildKit builders as its core product with 25 GB of cache on the $20 Developer plan or 250 GB on Startup, at up to 1,000 MiB/s, and it runs unlimited concurrency on every plan.

What Depot lacks is the minute. It now prices GitHub Actions runners at $0.006 a minute for 2 vCPU with 8 GB, which is 50% above Blacksmith Ubuntu x64 and identical to GitHub-hosted list. It also has no standalone free tier, and the repository must belong to a GitHub organization.

If you are leaving for your own cloud: WarpBuild or RunsOn

WarpBuild sells the same managed shape as Blacksmith at $0.004 a minute, so that is not the reason to move. The reason is its bring-your-own-cloud mode, a flat $0.002 a minute for Linux runners with no size tiers and the add-ons free, which puts the runners inside your own cloud account while WarpBuild keeps the control plane. RunsOn goes further: a flat annual license from EUR 300, no per-minute fee, and the EC2 bill lands on your account per second.

What both lack is the thing Blacksmith is good at. You are back to holding capacity, maintaining images and owning the pager, which is most of what a managed runner was buying you. RunsOn is free for open source, nonprofits and education, which no metered vendor here matches.

If you are leaving because of re-runs: Latchkey

Latchkey sells managed Linux runners at $0.0025 a minute for 2 vCPU with 8 GB, level with the Blacksmith ARM card and 38% under its x64 card, with 2,000 to 6,000 free minutes a month and a dependency cache carrying no separate meter, though no size is published for it either. Its distinctive row is the one nothing else in this table has: it diagnoses a transient failure inside the run and retries it, so the failed minutes and the re-run minutes are not both billed.

What it lacks, against Blacksmith specifically: Linux x86_64 only, so Blacksmith Windows and macOS cards have no equivalent, and there is no ARM shape to match Blacksmith at $0.0025. It caps concurrency at 20 busy runners per workspace and jobs at four hours, it bills per minute, and Ubicloud and Namespace undercut it on rate.

How to choose

Blacksmith is the right answer more often than a roundup implies, and the four checks below tell you whether it is the right answer for you.

1. Time your slowest job with /usr/bin/time -v and read CPU percentage against wall clock. Near 100% and single-threaded is the shape Blacksmith sells against, and no cheaper minute beats finishing sooner.
2. Add up your layer-cache and sticky-disk add-ons. If they are a real line, price Depot with its cache included against Blacksmith with the add-ons on top.
3. Count the jobs shorter than a minute. With Blacksmith granularity unpublished, assume per-job rounding and price it against Depot, which tracks by the second and totals whole minutes at the end of the month.
4. Count your re-runs across a month of workflow runs. Above a few percent, that number is larger than every rate difference in the table.

Switching, in both directions

Every vendor above is a runs-on label, and runner selection is per job. Point one expensive job at a candidate and compare two weeks of real runs. Before you read a rate difference as a saving, check how many of those runs were retries of an out-of-memory kill or a registry rate limit.

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: blacksmith-2vcpu-ubuntu-2404    # today
    # runs-on: depot-ubuntu-24.04
    # runs-on: namespace-profile-default
    # runs-on: latchkey-small
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v7
      - run: npm ci && npm test

The short answer

Stay on Blacksmith if your critical path is one long single-threaded step, if you use its Windows or macOS cards, or if 3,000 free minutes a month covers most of what you run. The single-core clock is its own pitch, not benchmarked here.

Move to Ubicloud for the rate on Linux x64. To Depot if Docker builds dominate and you were paying for the layer-cache add-on anyway. To WarpBuild BYOC or RunsOn if the runners belong inside your own cloud account. To Latchkey if the minutes you want back are the ones spent re-running failures unrelated to your code.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

References

• Blacksmith pricing: per-size rates, free minutes and add-ons (verified 2026-09-20)
• Blacksmith runner docs: instance types, concurrency and free minutes (verified 2026-09-20)
• Depot GitHub Actions runners: per-second tracking and whole-minute billing (verified 2026-09-20)
• WarpBuild pricing: managed size tiers and the flat BYOC rate (verified 2026-09-20)
• Ubicloud GitHub Actions runner sizes and rates (verified 2026-09-20)
• GitHub Actions documentation