GitHub Actions runner alternatives, ranked by published rate

By Kaveh Alemi·Latchkey

The GitHub Actions runner alternatives below are ranked by the Linux rate each vendor published on 2026-09-20 at 2 vCPU, because the rate is the only number all of them state in public. Rate alone picks the wrong runner more often than it picks the right one, so every row also carries the memory that rate buys, the free tier, and the thing that vendor does not do.

Two preconditions decide whether any of this applies. GitHub documents that "the use of standard GitHub-hosted runners is free" in public repositories, and nothing metered beats free. If the repository is private and still inside its included minutes, 2,000 a month on Free, 3,000 on Team and 50,000 on Enterprise Cloud, moving to a metered vendor turns a zero bill into a real one.

Past both of those, the criterion here is the published per-minute rate for a Linux x64 runner at 2 vCPU, private repository, read on 2026-09-20. It has one trap in it, and it is why most roundups mislead: vendors do not sell the same machine at 2 vCPU. Namespace prices a 4 GB shape and an 8 GB shape separately, and the cheap number quoted everywhere is the 4 GB one. Every table below carries the memory next to the rate.

One cost appears in none of these rate cards: the job that fails for a reason unrelated to your code, such as an out-of-memory kill or a registry rate limit. Those minutes bill, the re-run bills, and the merge waits. Work out what share of your runs are retries first.

Rates, free minutes and billing, ranked cheapest first

Ranks here are against the cheapest card each vendor publishes in this table. Latchkey is joint fourth of the eight. Hold the memory at 8 GB, what GitHub-hosted gives you at 2 vCPU, and it moves to joint third while Namespace drops from joint second to fifth, because its cheap card carries 4 GB.

What each rate actually gets you

These rows decide whether a cheap minute is a cheap job. A 10 GB cache is a different product from 250 GB, at any rate.

Concurrency, location and what you change to switch

The last column is the real cost of trying one: six of these eight change nothing but the runs-on line once the vendor is connected.

Ubicloud: the lowest published rate, Linux only

Ubicloud is an open-source cloud selling GitHub Actions runners on AMD EPYC Genoa as standard and Ryzen 9 as premium, at $0.0012 and $0.0020 a minute for 2 vCPU with 8 GB, with 1,250 free minutes a month and 30 GB of cache included. That is the cheapest published Linux rate here. What it lacks: Linux x64 only, sizes stopping at 16 vCPU, no published billing granularity or concurrency ceiling, and headline cards that disagree with its own size table by 20% on standard and 25% on premium.

Namespace: cheap per vCPU, if 2 GB per vCPU fits

Namespace bills unit minutes rather than runners: a unit is 1 vCPU and 2 GB of RAM for a minute, times a multiplier of 1 for Linux, 2 for Windows and 10 for macOS. A 2 vCPU 4 GB runner is $0.002 a minute prepaid; the same shape with 8 GB is $0.004, because memory costs units too. It publishes a Linux concurrency ceiling of 32, 64 or 160 vCPU by plan. What it lacks: at 8 GB it is no longer cheap, and there is no standing free allowance.

WarpBuild: the same managed rate, or half of it in your own cloud

WarpBuild sells managed Linux x64 at $0.004 a minute for 2 vCPU with 8 GB, arm64 at $0.003, Windows at $0.016 on its 4 vCPU card and macOS M4 Pro at $0.08 on its 6 vCPU card. Its distinctive row is bring-your-own-cloud: a flat $0.002 a minute for Linux runners, no size tiers, add-ons free, inside your own cloud account. What it lacks: no published free allowance, concurrency ceiling or cache size, and BYOC hands capacity planning back to you.

Latchkey: the same rate as its peers, plus repair

Latchkey sells managed Linux runners at $0.0025 a minute for 2 vCPU with 8 GB, $0.005 at 4 vCPU and $0.02 at 16, with 2,000 to 6,000 free minutes a month and a dependency cache that is a one-line swap for actions/cache. Its distinctive row is the last in the table: a transient failure is diagnosed and retried inside the run rather than billing the re-run. What it lacks: Linux x86_64 only, so arm64, Windows and macOS jobs stay put, three vendors here undercut its rate, and it publishes no cache size where most of this table does.

Blacksmith: a high single-core clock, at the median rate

Blacksmith runs jobs on its own metal and sells Ubuntu x64 at $0.004 a minute at 2 vCPU, Ubuntu ARM at $0.0025 on 3 GB per vCPU, Windows x64 at $0.008 and macOS M4 at $0.08, with 3,000 free minutes a month on every card. Its pitch, in its own words rather than a benchmark run here, is a high single-core clock. What it lacks: billing granularity is published nowhere, and Docker layer caching and sticky disks are add-ons at $0.50 per GB per month.

Depot: GitHub-hosted list price, with a real cache

Depot prices its GitHub Actions runners at $0.006 a minute for 2 vCPU with 8 GB, and its runner docs say it tracks builds by the second and bills for whole minutes used at the end of the month, with no one-minute minimum enforced. It sells 2 to 64 vCPU, Windows, macOS, arm64 and GPU, unlimited concurrency, and 25 GB or 250 GB of cache at up to 1,000 MiB/s. What it lacks: the minute no longer undercuts GitHub-hosted, there is no standalone free tier, and the repository must belong to a GitHub organization.

GitHub-hosted and RunsOn: the two ends of the table

GitHub-hosted is the reference implementation at $0.006 a minute for Linux 2-core x64, $0.005 for arm64, $0.010 for Windows and $0.062 for macOS, free on public repositories, with the widest OS coverage here. It rounds every job up to the whole minute, the one row where it is worst in class.

RunsOn is a different shape: a flat annual license from EUR 300 up to EUR 3,600 by volume tier, no per-minute markup, and the compute billed to you by AWS per second in your own account. Free for open source, nonprofits and education. What it lacks is everything managed: capacity, images and the pager are yours.

How to choose without guessing

Four measurements decide this. None is the rate card.

1. Confirm you are paying at all. Public repo, or inside your included minutes, and the answer is stay.
2. Read the memory column, not just the rate. Rank the table at the memory your slowest job actually needs, and half the order changes.
3. Count your re-runs. Pull the last month of workflow runs and work out what share are retries of a failed run. Above a few percent, reliability is the axis, not price.
4. Trial one job for two weeks. Runner selection is per job, so a wrong answer costs a revert commit rather than a migration.

Switching is one line, in both directions

Selection is per job: point your most expensive job at one vendor, leave the pipeline alone, and compare two weeks of runs. The vendor-specific paths are in Blacksmith alternatives, Depot alternatives and BuildJet alternatives.

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest                    # GitHub-hosted
    # runs-on: blacksmith-2vcpu-ubuntu-2404
    # 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

Public repository, or private and inside your included minutes: stay on GitHub-hosted. Linux x64 only and the rate decides it: Ubicloud. Cheapest per vCPU when 2 GB per vCPU is enough: Namespace prepaid. A compile-bound critical path: Blacksmith, whose ARM card at $0.0025 buys 6 GB at 2 vCPU, not 8.

Docker-heavy or cache-heavy builds: Depot. High volume with AWS in-house: RunsOn. Runners in your own cloud account: WarpBuild BYOC. Re-runs a measurable share of the bill: Latchkey.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

References

• GitHub Actions runner per-minute rates and rounding (verified 2026-09-20)
• GitHub Actions billing: included minutes and free public repositories (verified 2026-09-20)
• GitHub Actions limits: concurrent jobs by plan (verified 2026-09-20)
• Ubicloud GitHub Actions runner sizes and rates (verified 2026-09-20)
• Depot GitHub Actions runners: per-second tracking and whole-minute billing (verified 2026-09-20)
• GitHub Actions documentation