CircleCI

CircleCI is a hosted continuous integration service that runs your test and deploy pipelines on Docker, Linux, Arm, Windows and macOS executors. Engineering teams that have outgrown GitHub Actions' free minutes often move here. The Free plan is $0 a month with no credit card required, and the vendor markets it as including all premium features.

What the free plan gives you

Free includes 30,000 credits a month, which works out to up to 6,000 build minutes on the small Docker resource class, for up to 5 active users. Concurrency is 30 parallel jobs, and you can pick from small, medium, medium-plus and large resource classes across Docker x86, Arm Docker, Linux VM, Arm VM and Windows VM. Self-hosted runners get 5 concurrent tasks, and 2 GB of storage and 1 GB of network transfer are included.

Where the free plan stops

Credits are the ceiling. Larger resource classes burn credits faster than small Docker, so a team using medium Linux VMs for every job will see the 6,000-minute figure shrink a lot. The 5-user cap is the other trigger: a sixth committer needs the Performance plan. Performance starts at $15 a month, includes the same 30,000 credits and 5 users, then charges $15 per additional 25,000 credits and $15 per extra user, and raises concurrency to 80 and self-hosted runner tasks to 20. X-large and 2X-large classes and GPU executors are only on paid plans.

Who it suits

Small teams of up to five with a moderate test suite get a lot of CI for nothing, and the free concurrency is higher than most rivals'. Teams with more than five committers, heavy monorepo builds or GPU jobs should expect Performance to be a modest but real monthly cost.