Plain vs Jenkins.
Jenkins is free, infinitely flexible, and runs anywhere, which is how it ended up running everywhere. It is also a server your team operates: plugins to patch, agents to scale, and a Groovy DSL to maintain. The license costs nothing; the engineer babysitting it does not. Plain CI is a managed service in the same product as your code, with warm runners and no plugin tree.
// Coverage
Jenkins does one job. Plain is the whole setup.
Seven surfaces every software team ends up paying for, one way or another. Here is what each product actually covers.
| Surface | Jenkins | Plain |
|---|---|---|
| Code hosting | Not included | Included |
| Issue tracking | Not included | Included |
| Docs & wiki | Not included | Included |
| Team chat | Not included | Included |
| CI / CD | Includedself-hosted | Included |
| Packages | Not includedvia plugins | Included |
| AI agents | Not included | Included |
Jenkins fully covers 1 of the seven surfaces. Plain covers all seven on one seat.
// Credit where due
Where Jenkins is genuinely good.
- Total flexibility. With enough plugins and Groovy, Jenkins can automate genuinely anything, on any infrastructure.
- Self-hosting means your code and secrets never leave your network, which some environments require.
- Two decades of plugins cover integrations nothing else has.
The catch.
Jenkins turns CI into an internal product your team maintains: upgrades break plugins, plugins break builds, and the one person who understands the Jenkinsfile becomes load-bearing. None of that effort makes your product better. Plain CI removes the operations entirely, and because it shares a platform with your code, issues, and chat, a red build is a linked, discussable, assignable object rather than an email from a server.
// Pricing
One seat price vs a stack of them.
Jenkins
$0+ operations
Covers CI / CD. The other surfaces are other tools, other invoices.
Open source. The real cost is the infrastructure and the engineer-hours that keep it green.
Plain Pro
$24/ user / mo
Code, issues, docs, chat, CI, packages, and AI agents on every seat. One bill, one search index, one source of truth.
// FAQ
Common questions.
- Is Plain a Jenkins alternative?
- Yes. Plain CI replaces a self-managed Jenkins with managed pipelines that start the instant you push, defined as composable code instead of plugins and Groovy.
- Can I migrate Jenkins pipelines to Plain?
- Pipelines are rewritten rather than imported: Jenkinsfiles translate to Plain's code-defined pipelines, which is usually the moment teams discover how much of the Jenkinsfile was workarounds.
- Is Plain really cheaper than free Jenkins?
- Jenkins is free to license, not free to run. Count the build infrastructure plus even a fraction of an engineer's time on upkeep and a typical team passes Plain's $24 per user per month quickly.
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