Latchkey vs Buildkite for CI on GitHub

By Kaveh Alemi·Latchkey

These two are not the same kind of product. Buildkite is a full CI platform with its own pipeline format and a hybrid model that runs agents inside your infrastructure; Latchkey replaces the machines your existing GitHub Actions jobs run on and leaves the workflow files alone. Choosing Buildkite means rewriting pipelines into .buildkite/pipeline.yml and paying $30 per active user a month; choosing Latchkey means editing one runs-on line.

Buildkite runs your pipelines on agents you host yourself or on its hosted compute, billed at $0.004 per vCPU-minute, so a 2 vCPU agent is $0.008 a minute and a 4 vCPU agent is $0.016. On top of the compute it charges $30 per active user a month on Pro plus $3.50 per agent beyond the ten included, and its free plan covers five users and up to 2,000 Linux vCPU minutes a month. The pipelines are its own format, not GitHub Actions workflows.

Latchkey does not replace GitHub Actions. It gives the jobs you already have a different machine to run on, at $0.0025 a minute for 2 vCPU and 8 GB, with no seat fee and a self-healing agent that repairs transient failures inside the run. Everything about how your pipeline is defined, triggered and reported stays with GitHub.

Every cell below was read from the vendor's own public pricing or documentation page on 20 September 2026. Where a vendor does not publish a number, the cell says "not published" instead of carrying a guess.

Buildkite and Latchkey, read 20 September 2026

The comparison that actually matters is the migration

Every row in the table above is secondary to one fact: adopting Buildkite means rewriting your pipelines. Your .github/workflows files do not carry over, the uses: actions you depend on have no equivalent, and the triggers, environments, required checks and branch protections wired to those workflows all move with them. That is a project, not a configuration change.

Adopting Latchkey means editing a runs-on value on the jobs you choose. Everything else about your CI, including the parts you have not thought about in a year, stays exactly where it is. Whichever of these you prefer, price the migration before you price the minutes.

The seat fee is usually the biggest number

Buildkite charges $30 per active user a month on Pro before a single job runs, plus $3.50 a month per agent past the ten included. On a team of twenty that is $600 a month in seats, which is larger than most teams' entire compute bill on any of the runner vendors in this cluster. Latchkey has no seat fee of that shape: Developer is a single seat and Launch and Scale add seats at $5 a month.

Per-vCPU-minute billing also reads cheaper than it is. At $0.004 per vCPU-minute a 2 vCPU agent is $0.008 a minute and a 4 vCPU agent is $0.016, so Buildkite hosted compute is roughly three times the Latchkey rate at both sizes. It is metered to the second with no minimums and no rounding, which is genuinely better granularity than per-minute billing, but not by enough to close that gap.

Speed

Not benchmarked yet; the runner benchmark report will replace this section. We have not run the same workload on these runners ourselves, and until we have, there is no number here worth quoting.

The cheap way to get a real answer is to point one slow job at each candidate for a week, because runner selection is per job and the Actions run log gives you the timings for free.

Cost: one worked month

Ten thousand minutes a month on a 2 vCPU machine is 20,000 vCPU-minutes on Buildkite's meter, so $80 of hosted compute, less the 4,000 vCPU minutes Pro includes, so $64. Add $30 per active user: a team of ten is $300, making $364. The same month on Latchkey is $25 of compute.

Latchkey's own plan is $5 to $49 a month on top of that compute, and its 2,000 to 6,000 included minutes are not netted off, so the figure is gross on both counts.

That comparison is unfair in one direction and worth stating plainly: you are not buying the same thing. Buildkite's price includes an orchestrator, a UI, its own pipeline engine and the ability to run agents on your own hardware. Latchkey's price buys machines for an orchestrator you already have and do not pay extra for.

Reliability

Buildkite offers retry: automatic per step, which you configure yourself and which retries a failing step without diagnosing why it failed. That covers flaky tests reasonably well and covers an OOM kill or an exhausted disk not at all, because retrying the same step on the same shape of machine reproduces the same failure.

Latchkey diagnoses the failing step on the runner and applies a fix before retrying, which is the difference between a retry policy and a repair. Buildkite's hybrid model is the stronger answer on a different axis: agents on your own infrastructure means your CI capacity is yours, with no shared-pool queue between you and a deploy.

When to choose Buildkite

Choose Buildkite if you want to leave GitHub Actions as an orchestrator, which is a legitimate thing to want at scale, and you have the appetite for the pipeline rewrite that entails. Choose it if you need agents running inside your own infrastructure with your own hardware, GPUs or network access. Choose it if your pipelines have outgrown what Actions expresses well and the orchestrator itself is the thing you are replacing.

When to choose Latchkey

Choose Latchkey if GitHub Actions is working for you as an orchestrator and what you want is faster, cheaper machines and fewer red builds. The whole product is a label change: no pipeline rewrite, no seat fee, no second CI UI for your team to learn, and transient failures repaired in-run instead of retried blindly.

Switching

There is no YAML diff that turns a Buildkite pipeline into a Latchkey one, because Latchkey does not replace the pipeline. If you are on GitHub Actions today and evaluating both, the Latchkey change is one line and the Buildkite change is a project.

jobs:
  build:
-   runs-on: ubuntu-latest
+   runs-on: latchkey-medium
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4

The verdict

These products answer different questions. If the thing you want to replace is the orchestrator, Latchkey is not a candidate at all and the rate comparison is beside the point. If the thing you want to replace is the machine, Buildkite makes you rewrite your pipelines to get there and then charges $30 per active user a month for the privilege, which is hard to justify when a runs-on change gets you cheaper compute and keeps every workflow file you already have.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

References

• Buildkite pricing
• Buildkite: hosted agents and cache volumes
• Latchkey pricing
• GitHub: about billing for GitHub Actions
• GitHub Actions documentation