CircleCI pricing is highly flexible according to your needs, but it can be difficult knowing what you need. We’ll explain the cost structure of the solution, as well as how it compares to alternative CI/CD platforms. Afterwards, discover the benefits of Vertice’s SaaS Purchasing Platform, potentially saving you money when procuring CircleCI and other solutions, while also optimizing wider SaaS operations.   

What CircleCI can do for you

CircleCI is a cloud-based platform designed to streamline and enhance the software development process through continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), a methodology that automates the building, testing, and deployment of code as and when changes are made. 

Through continuous integration (CI), developers regularly integrate their code into a shared repository for automating build and test runs, helping to catch issues early in the development process. With continuous deployment (CD), code is automatically deployed to production environments once it passes quality assurance tests, ensuring quick and reliable delivery of new features and fixes. 

Using a platform like CircleCI enables development teams to realize the myriad benefits of CI/CD methodology:

• Faster development cycles – CircleCI automates repetitive tasks, letting developers focus on writing code rather than managing builds and deployments. Furthermore, multiple tests can be run concurrently, reducing the time required to validate code changes.
• Improved code quality – Automated testing catches issues earlier in the development cycle, reducing the cost and effort of fixing bugs. CircleCI also provides a consistent testing environment, leading to more reliable results.
• Increased deployment frequency – Thanks to CircleCI’s customizable, automated workflows, it’s easier to deploy smaller changes more frequently, reducing the risks associated with large, infrequent releases.
• Greater scalability – CircleCI is suitable for projects of any size, from startups to enterprise-grade applications, with highly flexible workflows scaling as required.
• Enhanced collaboration – CircleCI provides greater visibility into the build and deployment process, while integrations with tools like Slack and Jira keep team members informed and aligned.

Adopting CircleCI and CI/CD methodology means organizations can deliver high-quality software faster and more efficiently, ensuring code changes are reliable and production-ready while reducing code building and testing burdens.

CircleCI pricing structures and tiers

CircleCI pricing is primarily based on a credit system. These credits are purchased upfront and used to pay for real-time usage, such as for compute time, network and storage use, and monthly active users. Free and Performance plans come with 30,000 free credits per month by default. 

In terms of how this translates into compute time, it depends on resource type. For example, Linux Medium costs 10 credits per minute, so your free monthly credits would translate into 3,000 build minutes. More powerful resources cost more credits per minute.

Here’s a quick rundown of resource class categories and their pricing:

‍(x86) Docker – from 5 credits/min;

• (Arm) Docker / Remote Docker – from 13 credits/min;
• Linux VM / (x86) Remote Docker – from 10 credits/min;
• Arm VM (Linux) – from 10 credits/min;
• macOS VM – from 150 credits/min;
• Windows VM – from 40 credits/min;
• GPU – from 160 credits/min.

Along with compute credits, CircleCI pricing is also based on different subscription plans. These affect things like the types of resource you can use, number of active users, concurrency limits, and customer support. Here’s a breakdown.

CircleCI pricing – Free

Cost: $0.

Development teams can try CircleCI at zero cost with the free plan. This package is limited to five active users and includes 30,000 credits. As an example, that translates to 6,000 build minutes when using a small Docker resource class. 

Users are limited to 30 concurrent job runs (tasks that can be run simultaneously without queuing) and 5 concurrent tasks for self-hosted runners. The plan includes 1 GB of network egress and 2 GB of storage.

24/7 access to CircleCI’s community support forum is included, but there’s no ticket-based support or SLA available to free users. 

CircleCI pricing – Performance

Cost: from $15 per month.

Users on the Performance plan get 30,000 credits per month included, while additional credits cost $15 for 25,000 (with bulk discounting available). The plan includes five active users, with each additional user costing 25,000 credits (effectively $15) per month. 

This pricing tier gives access to larger resource classes not included in the free plan, although GPU resources are reserved for the Scale plan. Concurrency increases to 80 jobs and 20 for self-hosted runners.

Performance users get ticket-based global support, and there are 8x5 and 12x5 support SLAs available too. 5 GB of network egress is included, while included storage remains at 2 GB. 

CircleCI pricing – Scale

Cost: from $2,000 per month.

The Scale plan is aimed at the enterprise level, offering access to the largest resource classes (including GPU). Monthly credits, active users, and concurrency limits can be chosen based on your requirements. There’s 50 GB of network egress and 200 GB of storage included too, plus unlimited self-hosted runner concurrency. 

For support, 24x5 and 24x7 SLAs are available.  

CircleCI pricing – Server

Cost: contact sales.

Those wishing to deploy CircleCI on-prem or in a private cloud can opt for the Server plan, which includes unlimited build minutes and 30 user seats by default. This is ideal if you’d like all information to stay within your own network, while delivering high performance at scale.  

Additional CircleCI costs to consider

Some of CircleCI’s features cost additional credits. Here’s a quick look:

Network and storage use

Additional storage and network egress beyond your plan’s limits is charged at 420 credits per gigabyte. 

Docker layer caching (DLC)

If your CI/CD workflow regularly includes building Docker images, CircleCI can cache them to be reused during future builds in order to save time. This costs 200 credits per job.

IP ranges

If you need to configure IP-based access to your infrastructure — such as deploying an internal app with sensitive data or granting access to a production network — you can do this with the IP range feature. It costs 450 credits per GB of data used for jobs with the feature enabled. 

Release agent

CircleCI’s Releases feature gives users visibility and control over the release process by integrating with your Kubernetes cluster. Free and Performance plans get three free components (a collection of code and configuration) per month, and Scale plans get five free components per month. Additional components cost 40,000 credits each. 

From there, each component release — updating a component to a new version in a specific environment — costs 250 credits. 

Other vendors offering CI/CD platforms

Comparing CI/CD platforms before entering procurement negotiations is vital to finding the best solution and enhancing value creation. Here are three vendors to consider, and how they size up against CircleCI: 

Payscale pricing vs GitLab

GitLab is an all-in-one DevOps platform offering integrated source code management (SCM), CI/CD, project management, and robust security features within a single platform. GitLab's CI/CD is highly customizable, making it suitable for complex workflows and large enterprises. 

‍GitLab pricing includes a free tier, but advanced features require a subscription — plans begin at $29 per user per month (with 10,000 compute minutes included), making it more expensive than CircleCI for purely CI/CD, but a strong choice for comprehensive DevOps requirements.

Payscale pricing vs GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions is GitHub's CI/CD solution. It excels in simplicity, flexibility, and community-contributed actions, which streamline automation workflows. As it’s directly integrated into the GitHub ecosystem, it’s ideal for development teams already invested in the platform. 

The GitHub pricing structure provides free access to public repositories and a free tier with 2,000 minutes included for private repositories. Paid GitHub plans start at $4 per user per month (with 3,000 compute minutes included). Additional usage is competitive, with Linux runners available from as little as $0.005 per minute, so GitHub Actions may be more cost-effective compared to CircleCI.

Payscale pricing vs Jenkins

Jenkins is an open-source CI/CD tool offering high extensibility thanks to a vast plugin ecosystem. Its primary strengths are flexibility and extensive community support, allowing it to cater to various project needs and environments. 

As it’s open source, Jenkins itself is free, but operational costs can be high due to the need for infrastructure and resources. As it requires significant setup and maintenance, it’s best suited to enterprises and businesses with in-house DevOps expertise. Compared to CircleCI's managed service, Jenkins offers more control but at the cost of increased complexity and potentially higher long-term expenses.

CircleCI pricing – the Vertice verdict

Implementing a CI/CD tool like CircleCI can deliver significant benefits across your development pipeline. The platform’s flexible pricing means it caters to a wide range of businesses, and the free tier allows you to try it out without any financial commitment. 

If you’re planning to upgrade to a CircleCI paid plan, why not let Vertice help with your procurement? Our exclusive pricing benchmarks can help you negotiate strategically — or we can do so on your behalf — to get the lowest CircleCI price in line with your business requirements. 

Furthermore, our SaaS Purchasing Platform can help save costs by optimizing SaaS license management and providing complete full-stack observability. We manage over $3.4 billion in software spending across our partners. Want to know how we could help you? Simply get in touch using the form below.