Buildkite vs Cachix
Buildkite
buildkite.comCachix
cachix.orgSide by side
| Figure | Buildkite | Cachix |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $30/mo | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 3 |
| Spec score · Artifact repository software | 8.6 (#9) | 8.1 (#22) |
| Access controls | The security page lists SAML SSO, default multi-factor authentication for organization members, audit logging, team-based permissions, and per-job OIDC integration. | Team members can be granted read and/or write access to a cache, and access tokens can be revoked at any time. |
| Company | Buildkite says it was founded in 2013 and operates as a fully remote team across more than 60 cities. | Cachix was launched in 2018 by Enlambda OÜ to accelerate Nix adoption through infrastructure and education. |
| Founded | 2013 | 2018 |
| Purpose | Buildkite Pipelines is a platform for building CI/CD workflows, with pipeline steps dispatched as jobs to agents. | Cachix shares binaries between CI, development, and deployment environments. |
| Support | The Free Plan includes community support, Pro includes priority email support, and Enterprise includes support with SLA credits and Slack Connect. | Cachix lists live chat, email, GitHub issues, and a service status page as support or feedback channels. |
Plans
In their own words
Buildkite
Buildkite Pipelines is a CI/CD platform that dispatches pipeline steps as jobs to agents. Agents can be hosted by Buildkite or run in a customer's own infrastructure, including on-premises and cloud environments. Dynamic pipelines can generate and upload steps during a build, allowing a workflow to respond to code changes, test results or runtime logic. Test Engine collects results across testing frameworks and provides tools to track, analyze and act on them. It can detect and quarantine flaky tests, split tests across parallel jobs, and monitor test performance, reliability and ownership. Documented integrations include Slack, PagerDuty, Datadog, Honeycomb, OpenTelemetry, Amazon EventBridge, Artifactory, Docker Hub and Backstage. Buildkite lists TLS 1.2+ for data in transit and AES-256 encryption at rest, along with an annually audited SOC 2 Type II report. The Free Plan costs nothing and allows up to 5 users and 10 concurrent jobs. Pro costs $30 a month, billed per active user monthly, and includes up to 50 users and up to 250 concurrent agents, with 10 included.
Cachix
Cachix hosts Nix binary caches so teams can share binaries across CI, development, and deployment environments. Its CLI can push binaries, watch a Nix store, and configure Nix to use a cache. The service says its optimizations speed up cache roundtrips, while Cloudflare CDN provides performance and unlimited bandwidth on all plans. When a cache reaches its storage limit, least-recently-used entries are removed; Cachix says it sends a warning email at 85% of that limit. Documentation includes CI guides for GitHub Actions, Buildkite, CircleCI, GitLab CI, Hercules CI, Hydra, and Travis CI. Cachix Deploy uses a pull model to deploy continuously to Nix profiles such as NixOS, nix-darwin, and Home Manager. Teams can assign read or write access, revoke tokens, and require a token for private cache reads and writes; cache entries are signed. Enterprise options include on-premise or self-hosted deployment, SSO, SLA, dedicated premium support, custom deployment, and audit logs. Cachix offers a free plan and a 14-day trial. Listed Starter, Standard, and Pro plans have prices available by contacting Cachix.