GitHub Actions are pretty damn cool, but lord knows the official runners are slow, unreliable, and expensive. Self-hosted runners are typically championed as the better alternative, but they're also a pain to set up and maintain and they come with important security concerns.

It doesn't have to be one or the other. Most people don't know this, but there's quite a few third-party GH Actions runner services out there, most of which require no changes at all to your CI workflows. These are easy to migrate to, much cheaper than official runners, and often faster.

• Awesome GitHub Actions runners 🏃🏾‍♀️🤖
  • Table of contents
  • List of providers
    • BuildJet ⭐
    • Namespace ⭐
    • Actuated ⭐
    • Cirun
    • WarpBuild
    • Ubicloud
    • GitRunners
  • Honorable mentions
  • Contributing to this list

BuildJet offers managed performance runners for GitHub Actions.

Pricing here.

Notable features:

• 1-line change to get faster and cheaper builds in most projects.
• 64GiB disk storage¹ and 20GiB free cache per repository² via buildjet/cache (as opposed to 16GiB disk storage and 10GiB free cache per repository in GitHub official runners).
• ARM support.³
• Built-in support for Swatinem/rust-cache via backend: buildjet.
• (Coming soon) SOC2 compliance.⁴ 🚧

Namespace provides development environments, remote builders, ephemeral environments, managed CI runners, and more. It also supports BuildKite⁵.

Pricing here.

Notable features:

• 1-line change to get faster and cheaper builds in most projects.
• Up to 250GiB disk storage and terabytes of cache, considerably more than both BuildJet and GitHub official runners.
• High-performance caching via mounted volumes backed by local storage. This is a separate API from actions/cache, but much faster and more reliable.
• Built-in observability for CPU, memory, and storage usage. Streams and retains Docker container logs in addition to runner logs. Remote terminal (SSH) access.
• Dedicated high-performance remote Docker builders with zero-configuration incremental caching, ARM support, and more.⁶
• Supports ephemeral previews running on runners as well as separate instances, based on Docker⁷ or Kubernetes⁸.
• Custom base images support.
• (Coming soon) Apple Silicon support (~Jan 2024), Windows support (Q1 2024). 🚧
• (Coming soon) SOC2 compliance (Q1 2024). 🚧

Actuated brings fast and secure GitHub Actions to your own infrastructure. It's a more ops-heavy solution compared to fully managed runners, but this comes with significant benefits and attractive pricing.

Pricing here.

Notable features:

• Native ARM support.⁹
• Runs directly within your own datacenter, which is useful if you work with large container images or datasets.
• Live debug stuck jobs over SSH.¹⁰
• Flat-rate billing based on the maximum allowed number of concurrent jobs, so the cost stays the same no matter how many minutes you use.
• Cool development blog showcasing many kinds of demoes, examples, and guides.¹¹

Cirun is a tool which lets you create on-demand self-hosted GitHub Actions runners on your cloud. After connecting your cloud provider of choice, it's simple to set up and cheap to run.

Pricing here.

Notable features:

• 1-line change to get faster and cheaper builds in most projects.¹²
• Free for public repositories!
• Cheap, flat-rate pricing based on the number of private repositories you run Cirun on.
• Native ARM support.
• GPU support.¹³
• Support for all major cloud providers.¹⁴
• Built by just one developer (Amit Kumar) in their spare time, so long-term maintenance is a concern.

WarpBuild offers high performance runners for GitHub Actions. It's a very new product made by the creators of Argonaut and it has few features compared to other providers, but it's still worth keeping an eye on as it's likely to improve over time.

Pricing here.

Notable features:

• 1-line change to get faster and cheaper builds in most projects.¹⁵
• Support for x86-64 and ARM runners with unlimited concurrency.
• Live debug failed jobs over SSH.¹⁶
• Discounts for open-source projects and young startups, and referral programs to get extra minutes.¹⁷
• Minimal documentation and unclear hardware specs. ⚠️
• (Coming soon) Windows, macOS, and custom base images support (~Jan 2024). 🚧

Ubicloud brings IaaS solutions to bare metal servers, but it also offers a managed platform. GitHub Actions runners are part of this offering. It doesn't seem to have any feature that other providers lack, but it has one of the most attractive pricing plans in the market.

Pricing here.

Notable features:

• 1-line change to get faster and cheaper builds in most projects.¹⁸
• By far one of the cheapest providers at about ~10x cheaper than official GH Actions runners.¹⁸
• 1250 free minutes per month.¹⁹
• Source open under the Elastic V2 license, if you choose to manage Ubicloud VMs yourself²⁰

GitRunners speeds up GitHub actions with cost-effective performance runners. It's cheaper than GitHub official runners, but doesn't hold up as well against other third-party runners.

Pricing here.

Notable features:

• 1-line change to get faster and cheaper builds in most projects.
• (Coming soon) Persistent storage and mounted volumes. 🚧
• (Coming soon) Flamegraph visualizations to analyze workflow runtimes. 🚧

If you're interested in going down the self-hosted runner route, make sure to check out the tooling listed in jonico/awesome-runners!

If you'd like to add a service to this list or suggest any changes, please feel free to open a PR.