5 best Bitbucket Pipelines alternatives for scalable CI/CD

Bitbucket Pipelines is a cloud-based CI/CD solution integrated directly into Bitbucket Cloud repositories. It enables teams to build, test, and deploy code automatically using YAML configuration files stored alongside their source code.

Pipelines run in Docker containers and integrate seamlessly with other Atlassian products like Jira and Confluence. Teams can define workflows with parallel steps, use cloud runners or self-hosted runners, and manage deployments across multiple environments from within Bitbucket.

When evaluating alternatives to Bitbucket Pipelines, look out for these key factors that address common limitations and requirements:

• Pricing model: Look beyond per-minute billing; teams running comprehensive test suites can quickly consume tens of thousands of build minutes monthly at $10 per 1,000 minutes. Consider platforms with per-second billing, flat-rate pricing, or self-hosted options that reduce metered costs.
• Version control flexibility: Ensure the platform supports your preferred VCS (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps) or works across multiple providers simultaneously to avoid vendor lock-in.
• Advanced CI/CD features: Look for platforms offering multi-stage release pipelines, blue-green deployments, canary releases, advanced caching strategies, and granular deployment controls that go beyond basic build-test-deploy workflows.
• Beyond CI/CD capabilities: Determine if you need just a build tool or a complete platform that includes production infrastructure, database hosting, job scheduling, and workload management to get rid of tool fragmentation.
• Deployment model options: Choose between managed SaaS, bring-your-own-cloud (BYOC) deployments, or self-hosted solutions based on your data residency, compliance, and cost control requirements.
• Infrastructure management overhead: Evaluate whether self-hosted runners require acceptable levels of manual provisioning, configuration, updates, and security patching, or if managed solutions better fit your team's capacity.
• Pipeline customization: Look for platforms that provide granular control over build environments, robust debugging tools, flexible workflow orchestration, and reusable templates across repositories for complex workflows.
• Enterprise requirements: Verify support for RBAC, audit logging, SSO, compliance features, and security capabilities like VM-level isolation for running untrusted code or multi-tenant workloads.
• Preview and staging environments: Check if the platform offers built-in ephemeral environments for testing pull requests with full-stack dependencies, or if this requires additional tooling and custom scripts.

We'll review the 5 top Bitbucket Pipelines alternatives based on their CI/CD capabilities, deployment flexibility, pricing models, and platform features to help you choose the best fit for your team.

Northflank is a complete cloud platform that combines production-grade CI/CD with full infrastructure capabilities for deploying applications, databases, jobs, and GPU workloads in your cloud or ours.

Key features

• Rapid CI/CD with GitOps: Automatically build from GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket on every commit with path rules.
• Release pipelines: Manage multi-stage releases across development, staging, and production with visual pipeline workflows, conditional steps, automated rollbacks, and one-click promotions
• Ephemeral preview environments: Automatically spin up full-stack preview environments for every pull request, complete with databases, microservices, and jobs, then tear them down when done
• Complete platform beyond CI/CD: Not just builds, run your entire stack including apps, databases, jobs, and inference workloads on the same platform
• True bring-your-own-cloud: Deploy in your AWS, GCP, Azure, Civo, Oracle, or bare-metal infrastructure with complete control over costs and data residency
• Secure sandbox execution: VM-level isolation with Kata Containers and gVisor for running untrusted code, AI agents, and multi-tenant workloads
• Infrastructure as code: Create reusable templates for complex deployments with JSON configuration and bidirectional Git sync
• Auto-scaling and observability: Real-time logging, metrics, and automatic scaling based on CPU, memory, or custom metrics
• Per-second billing: Pay only for what you use with granular per-second billing instead of rounding up to minutes or hours

Best for: Teams needing both CI/CD pipelines and a complete platform to run production workloads, organizations requiring secure multi-tenant isolation for code execution, and companies wanting to avoid vendor lock-in by deploying across multiple clouds or in their own infrastructure.

See these helpful guides:

• Continuous integration and delivery on Northflank
• Set up a pipeline
• What is continuous delivery? Tools, pipelines, and how modern teams are implementing it
• 14 best CI/CD tools for teams
• 10 best continuous deployment tools (includes app & automation deployment tools)

GitHub Actions is a cloud-native CI/CD platform integrated directly into GitHub repositories with workflow automation using YAML configuration.

Key features

• Native GitHub integration: Workflows trigger automatically on push, pull request, issue creation, and other GitHub events
• Self-hosted runners: Run workflows on your own infrastructure for sensitive workloads or custom hardware
• Matrix builds: Test across multiple versions, operating systems, and configurations simultaneously
• Secrets management: Store encrypted secrets and environment variables securely within GitHub
• Artifact handling: Upload and download build artifacts between workflow steps

Best for: Teams already using GitHub for version control and organizations wanting tight integration between code and CI/CD.

Limitations: Locked to GitHub repositories (doesn't work with GitLab or Bitbucket), limited to 2,000 CI/CD minutes per month on free private repos, and no built-in production infrastructure beyond CI/CD workflows.

GitLab CI/CD is an integrated CI/CD solution built into GitLab's complete DevOps platform with configuration-as-code using .gitlab-ci.yml files.

Key features

• Complete DevOps platform: Combines version control, CI/CD, security scanning, container registry, and release management in one tool
• Auto DevOps: Automatically detects, builds, tests, and deploys applications with predefined templates
• Kubernetes integration: Native support for deploying to Kubernetes clusters with environment management
• Parallel execution: Run jobs concurrently to reduce pipeline execution time

Best for: Teams wanting an all-in-one DevOps platform and organizations already using GitLab for version control.

Limitations: Resource-heavy for self-hosted deployments at scale, best value when using the entire GitLab ecosystem rather than just CI/CD, and external integrations require more configuration compared to using GitLab's native tools.

See 9 Best GitLab alternatives for CI/CD

Jenkins is an open-source automation server that provides extensive customization through a massive plugin ecosystem with over 1,800 available plugins.

Key features

• Plugin ecosystem: Over 1,800 plugins for integrating with many tools or technologies
• Distributed builds: Master-agent architecture for scaling across multiple machines
• Groovy-based pipelines: Write complex workflows using Groovy DSL for maximum control
• Platform agnostic: Works with all major version control systems, languages, and deployment targets

Best for: Large enterprises with dedicated DevOps teams, organizations requiring complete control over their CI/CD infrastructure, and companies with complex compliance requirements or air-gapped environments.

Limitations: Steep learning curve with outdated UI, requires significant manual setup and ongoing maintenance, plugin compatibility can create stability issues, and self-hosted infrastructure demands constant attention from dedicated resources.

CircleCI is a cloud-based CI/CD platform designed for speed and simplicity with intelligent caching and parallel execution.

Key features

• Fast builds: Optimized for speed with intelligent caching and resource allocation
• Docker layer caching: Cache Docker layers between builds to reduce build times
• Parallel testing: Automatically split tests across multiple containers
• Insights dashboard: Analytics showing build performance, success rates, and bottlenecks
• Orbs: Reusable configuration packages for common workflows and integrations
• ARM support: Native support for ARM architectures alongside x86

Best for: Teams prioritizing build speed and developer experience, startups and scale-ups needing quick setup without infrastructure management, and organizations using Docker-based workflows.

Limitations: Limited free tier with only 6,000 build minutes per month, pricing scales based on parallelism and compute resources, and requires upgrading to higher-tier plans for advanced features like test splitting and insights.

Look at how these platforms compare across key decision factors to find the best Bitbucket Pipelines alternative for your team's needs.

Choosing the right Bitbucket Pipelines alternative depends on your infrastructure needs and how much control you want over deployments.

Northflank unifies CI/CD and production infrastructure into a single platform: build, deploy, and run applications, databases, and jobs with release pipelines and per-second billing in our cloud or yours (including on-premises).