Jenkins has a long tail of pain.

CI "simplification" there gets stale fast once plugins age out of sync, upgrades turn into archaeology, and some random maintainer vanishes. Losing faith in GitHub is one thing, but paying an engineer to babysit CI infra every week is usually a worse deal than the SaaS bill.

Charging for self-hosted runners is like a corkage fee but you still need to open the bottle yourself.

I don’t know what’s worse - in 2026 someone genuinely suggesting Jenkins as a viable GHA alternative, or me agreeing with that.

Jenkins has possibly the worst user experience of any piece of software I’ve had to use in the last few years. It’s slow, brittle, somehow both heavyweight and has no features, littered with security vulns due to architecture, is impossible to navigate, has absolutely no standardisation for usage.

And yet it’s still more reliable than GHA.

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