GitHub Actions versus AWS CodePipeline

17 Apr 2024

Learn how GitHub Actions differs from AWS CodePipeline.

GitHub Actions AWS CodePipeline
Free Tier (Linux)

free for public repositories
GitHub Free: 2,000 build minutes per month
GitHub Pro: 3,000 build minutes
GitHub Team: 10,000 build minutes

50 minutes per month

Costs for Pipeline

free

$1.00 per month

Costs for Build Job

$0.008 per minute

$0.010 per minute

Environments

Linux, Windows, macOS

Linux, (Windows)

Source Code Repository

GitHub

GitHub, Bitbucket, AWS CodeCommit, Amazon S3

Deployment Target

Any environment, works best for public cloud providers.

Mainly AWS, in theory you could deploy to other cloud providers as well.

AWS Authentication

Store access keys of IAM user in GitHub Secrets

IAM role, no need to manage access keys

Developer Experience

πŸ– Easy to use

πŸ€·β€β™€οΈ Difficult to get started

Integrations

Open marketplace providing all kinds of integrations of mixed quality.

Pre-built and high quality integrations into the AWS ecosystem.

Self-hosted Workers?

βœ…

⚠️ with custom actions and custom code

Serialize pipeline executions

βœ…

βœ…

Support for multiple branches?

βœ…

❌

Pipeline as Code

βœ…

⚠️ with custom CloudFormation or Terraform and CodeBuild action