Greenhouse vs Jenkins

Greenhouse does not publish specific pricing. The company states that pricing is customized based on your hiring needs, hiring volume, organizational complexity, and required features.

When the build needs something hosted runners cannot give you: physical hardware, an air-gapped network, a node-locked commercial tool licence, or an unusual platform. If none of those apply, hosted CI is usually less work to own.

Greenhouse offers three plan levels: Core (basic hiring structure), Plus (multi-location optimization), and Pro (complex enterprise hiring). Exact pricing requires contacting Greenhouse for a custom quote.

Not in the open source distribution, which runs a single active controller. High availability and active-active controllers are features of CloudBees' commercial products. Open source deployments mitigate it with fast restores and, sometimes, multiple independent controllers.

No. Core includes sourcing and scheduling, Plus adds automation and texting, and Pro adds enterprise data configuration and audit logs. All tiers can be customized.

This is the main operational risk. Many plugins have a single volunteer maintainer, and Jenkins publishes security advisories for unmaintained plugins where no fix exists. Auditing which plugins you depend on and who maintains them should be a periodic task, not a one-off.

For declarative pipelines you can go a long way without it. Anything involving shared libraries, conditional logic or custom steps is Groovy, and it runs in a sandboxed, transformed environment where standard Groovy idioms sometimes behave unexpectedly.

The software is free under the MIT licence. The cost is infrastructure and staff time to run controllers, agents and upgrades, plus a CloudBees subscription if you want high availability, support or centralised management of many controllers.