Jenkins

Score8.3 out of 10

474 Reviews and Ratings

What is Jenkins?

Jenkins is an open source automation server. Jenkins provides hundreds of plugins to support building, deploying and automating any project. As an extensible automation server, Jenkins can be used as a simple CI server or turned into a continuous delivery hub for any project.

Categories & Use Cases

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Jenkins is used for triggering builds in our company. We have more than 20+ apps which needs to be deployed , and we take help of jenkins to do so. From frontend, to backend to ML team, all uses jenkins for their deployment.
Jenkins helps us speed up our delivery by allowing parallel builds and testing, significantly improving deployment times. Jenkins integrates seamlessly with Git (GitHub/GitLab), Docker, Kubernetes, and other DevOps tools we use, enabling end-to-end automation.

Pros

Monitors source code repositories pretty well
Automatically triggers the deployment when new code is pushed
Advanced logic like conditional steps, parallel execution, or environment-specific stages
Reusability across projects using shared libraries

Cons

Complex UI
Less user friendly
Should not go down
Plugin Dependency and Maintenance Overhead
Limited Native Support for Modern Cloud-Native Workflows

Return on Investment

Faster deployments
Reduced Human Errors & Downtime
Standardization Across Teams
Initial Setup Time is more

Usability

Alternatives Considered

GitLab

Other Software Used

Cursor, WebStorm

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Jenkins integrates well with tools like Ansible, Terraform, Docker, and Kubernetes. Used to automate the build, test, and deployment processes across multiple teams, projects, and environments.

Pros

Lots of plugins.
Highly Configurable.

Cons

UI/UX Feels Outdated.
Steep learning curve.

Return on Investment

Scalability.
Improved Code Quality and Reliability.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Atlassian Bamboo, GitLab and GitHub

Other Software Used

GitLab, Atlassian Bamboo, GitHub

Joshua Jordan

Sr Systems Engineer in Engineering at Mercury (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My team primarily uses Jenkins, an application deployment tool. We create automated jobs that test code and then deploy to servers/containers and restart the apps. We have also begun implementing several CI/CD uses where we are able to automate jobs to deploy container infrastructure code to Git and have runners automatically deploy into our environments.

Pros

Works with Git very well.
Easy to write in preferred coding language.
Easy to allow varied levels of access to different jobs/dirs.
Large selection of plugins to customize.

Cons

Jenkins config.yaml recovery is not smooth and takes a lot of legwork.
Plugins that go out of date can cause issues with upgrades.
Progress UI frequently lacks detailed descriptions from Jenkin's side.

Most Important Features

CI/CD
Git Integration.
Automated/Scheduled Jobs.
Access Control.

Return on Investment

Improves Engineer to Dev efficiency.
Maintains consistency between users.
Provides project visibility.

Alternatives Considered

Travis CI, GitLab and Azure DevOps Server

Other Software Used

GitLab, ServiceNow IT Service Management, Venafi Control Plane for Machine Identities, Microsoft SharePoint

Lisa Krol

Quality Assurance Engineer at Phase Change Software (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Jenkins in multiple ways. As part of the QA team, we use Jenkins to run all of our API tests automatically and report back to us. We have some tests that we have special emails for every time they run. We also use it to run our automated UI tests. On the dev side, we use Jenkins to control our builds; we have pipelines in place for our dev environments, qa environments, and formal and prod environments. We then can control which environments get built. We also have pipelines in place for after-power outages so that we can quickly and effectively bring all our servers back up, which run scripts to do so.

Pros

Scheduling jobs is quick and easy.
Lots of plugins and integrations.
Quickly add jobs with very similar run settings.

Cons

The UI could be slightly better, it feels kind of like the 90s, but it works well.
An easier way to filter jobs other than views on the dashboard.
An easier way to read the console logs when tests do fail.

Most Important Features

Integrations with our tools.
Plugins that work well.
Easily configurable.

Return on Investment

We run about 30 test projects through Jenkins every day, multiple times a day; this allows us to focus on new tests rather than manually running all these tests.
We rely heavily on reporting capabilities and email notifications; we have some jobs that send emails every time they run so we know if there is an issue with any of our services.

Other Software Used

TriNet, ReadyAPI, SwaggerHub, mabl, TestRail, GitLab

Shivanand Labbi

Senior software engineer in Information Technology at Manhattan (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Jenkins as a main CICD in our project, we organize jobs with similar function into Group, we create jobs for the build, compile, and unit test each time a developer check-in their code to a specified branch and build a new version of artifact when having master branch commit. We add some additional plugin and create Jenkins jobs for run system test, automation test, and integration test automatically when having new commit to master and have jobs for deploy our new code to destination VMs on demand.

Pros

continuous deployment
continuous integration
continuous delivery also it's the best integration tools in the market

Cons

Jenkins UI looks bit classic, and it is hard for manage when we have a large number of jobs and pipeline
It does not have features for tracking job history, sometimes accident deletes or changes to a job and we unable to recover it.
User and roles management needs some improvement

Return on Investment

It made very good impact in business by fastening the process
It provides single place for building all the jobs
I don't see any negative impact from Jenkins

Usability

Alternatives Considered

GitLab

Other Software Used

PagerDuty, Docker, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Google Cloud Build