Cachix vs NativeLink
Cachix
cachix.org
NativeLink
nativelink.comSide by side
| Figure | Cachix | NativeLink |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 3 |
| Spec score · Build Cache Software | 7.9 (#9) | 7.5 (#17) |
| Company | Cachix was launched in 2018 by Enlambda OÜ to accelerate Nix adoption through infrastructure and education. | NativeLink is built by Trace Machina, whose company page describes work for industries including semiconductors, robotics, autonomous vehicles, AI research, life sciences, and financial services. |
| Deployment | Cachix Deploy continuously deploys to Nix profiles such as NixOS, nix-darwin, and Home Manager using a pull model. | The documentation describes NativeLink as a single Rust binary that can act as the cache, scheduler, and worker with different configurations. |
| Product | Cachix is a service for hosting Nix binary caches. | NativeLink combines remote build caching, remote execution, and observability in a Rust-native platform. |
| Support | Cachix lists live chat, email, GitHub issues, and a service status page as support or feedback channels. | The free Open Source tier provides community Slack support, while Enterprise includes dedicated engineering support. |
Plans
NativeLink
- Open SourceFree
- Enterprise Tier 1Price not published
- Enterprise Tier 2Price not published
In their own words
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.
NativeLink
NativeLink brings remote build caching, remote execution, and observability into a Rust-native platform. Its content-addressed cache deduplicates build artifacts so teams, CI systems, and agents can reuse prior results. Remote execution spreads compilation and tests across worker fleets on AWS, GCP, or bare metal, with GPU, ARM, and Apple Silicon support. Listed build systems include Bazel, Buck2, Siso, Soong, Pants, Goma, BuildStream, and CMake through recc. CI integrations include GitHub Actions, GitLab, Buildkite, and Jenkins; other listed connections include AWS, GCP, Azure, S3, GCS, and Redis. The product also lists integrations with AI coding platforms. It can run as a self-hosted Rust binary. Clients support Linux, macOS, and Windows, while servers support Linux and macOS. The free Open Source tier includes community Slack support. Most of the monorepo uses FSL-1.1-Apache-2.0, but metrics and remote persistent workers are Business Source License modules requiring Enterprise or a separate license for shared production use.