janpio / awesome-github-actions-runners

Save $$$ and make GitHub Actions go brrr with third-party runners

Awesome GitHub Actions runners 🏃🏾‍♀️🤖

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.

Table of contents

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

List of providers

BuildJet ⭐

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.
• (Upcoming) SOC2 compliance.⁴ 🔜

Namespace ⭐

Namespace provides development environments, remote builders, ephemeral environments, managed CI runners, and more.

Pricing here.

Notable features:

• 1-line change to get faster and cheaper builds in most projects.
• Up to 250GiB disk storage and 100GiB cache, considerably more than both BuildJet and GitHub official runners.
• Caching is done via mounted volumes, which is API-incompatible with actions/cache but much faster and more reliable. A compatibility layer is available but marked as deprecated.⁵
• Dedicated remote Docker builders with large capacity, zero-configuration incremental caching, ARM support, and more.⁶
• Many, many more CI solutions other than GitHub Actions runners. Check out their website for more information.

Actuated ⭐

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.⁷
• Runs directly within your own datacenter, which is useful if you work with large container images or datasets.
• Live debug stuck jobs over SSH.⁸
• 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.⁹

Cirun

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.¹⁰
• Free for public repositories!
• Cheap, flat-rate pricing based on the number of private repositories you run Cirun on.
• Native ARM support.
• GPU support.¹¹
• Support for all major cloud providers.¹²
• Built by just one developer (Amit Kumar) in their spare time, so long-term maintenance is a concern.

GitRunners

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.
• (Upcoming) Persistent storage and mounted volumes. 🔜
• (Upcoming) Flamegraph visualizations to analyze workflow runtimes. 🔜

Honorable mentions

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

Contributing to this list

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

Footnotes

1. https://buildjet.com/for-github-actions/docs/runners/hardware#runner-disk ↩

2. https://buildjet.com/for-github-actions/docs/guides/migrating-to-buildjet-cache ↩

3. https://buildjet.com/for-github-actions/docs/guides/migrating-to-arm ↩

4. https://buildjet.com/for-github-actions/docs/about/security#is-build-jet-soc-2-compliant ↩

5. https://cloud.namespace.so/docs/actions/nscloud-cache-action ↩

6. https://cloud.namespace.so/docs/features/faster-builds ↩

7. https://actuated.dev/blog/native-arm64-for-github-actions ↩

8. https://docs.actuated.dev/tasks/debug-ssh/ ↩

9. https://actuated.dev/blog ↩

10. https://docs.cirun.io/reference/one-line ↩

11. https://docs.cirun.io/reference/yaml#gpu-gpu ↩

12. https://docs.cirun.io/reference/yaml#cloud-cloud ↩