Alternatives
Blacksmith alternatives
A YC-backed managed runner platform positioned as a drop-in GitHub Actions replacement, advertising up to 2× faster CI with faster caching and lower cost. Raised a Series B led by Peak XV and is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant.
What Blacksmith does well
- Strong engineering brand — genuinely good writing on Docker caching and CI economics
- Gaming-grade bare-metal CPUs for single-threaded build speed
- SOC 2 Type 2, plus a Tailscale integration for private network access
- Well-known logos and a mature customer-story programme
Where we differ
- No comparison, glossary or solution pages — thin coverage for teams researching options
- No bring-your-own-cloud option: builds run on their infrastructure or not at all
- Fewer published runner families than platforms offering Windows and GPU tiers
| Blacksmith | runnerhut | |
|---|---|---|
| Drop-in runs-on | Yes | Yes |
| Docker layer cache | Yes | Yes |
| macOS runners | Yes | Yes |
| Windows runners | Not published | Yes |
| Bring your own cloud | No | AWS, GCP, Azure |
| EU-only data residency | Not published | Yes |
| GPU runners | Not published | Yes |
Other options worth evaluating
- GitHub-hosted runners — The default runners built into GitHub Actions. Zero setup, billed per minute against your GitHub plan, with larger runners and native arm64 available on paid tiers.
- WarpBuild — A hosted runner platform offering Linux, macOS and Windows runners plus bring-your-own-cloud deployments on AWS, GCP and Azure. Advertises roughly 2× faster builds at about half the cost of GitHub-hosted runners.
- Namespace — Ephemeral compute for CI and development: drop-in GitHub runners alongside devboxes, sandboxes and ephemeral Kubernetes clusters, with Bazel remote execution and egress filtering.
- Ubicloud — An open-source cloud that runs managed GitHub Actions runners alongside managed Postgres and Kubernetes, competing primarily on price-performance and on being open and portable.
- BuildJet — A managed performance-runner service for GitHub Actions that shut down on 31 March 2026. Its migration guidance pointed customers back to GitHub-hosted runners.
- Depot — Best known for accelerated remote Docker builds, with GitHub Actions runners added alongside. Strongest when container image build time dominates your pipeline.
- Actions Runner Controller (ARC) — The open-source Kubernetes operator for self-hosted GitHub Actions runners. Free software, but you operate the cluster, the autoscaling, the images and the caching yourself.
Your next build could be twice as fast, at half the price
Start free. Migrating away is the same one line, and we publish that diff too.
Related
GitHub-hosted runnersThe default runners built into GitHub Actions. Zero setup, billed per minute against your GitHub plan, with larger runners and native arm64 available on paid tiers.WarpBuildA hosted runner platform offering Linux, macOS and Windows runners plus bring-your-own-cloud deployments on AWS, GCP and Azure. Advertises roughly 2× faster builds at about half the cost of GitHub-hosted runners.NamespaceEphemeral compute for CI and development: drop-in GitHub runners alongside devboxes, sandboxes and ephemeral Kubernetes clusters, with Bazel remote execution and egress filtering.UbicloudAn open-source cloud that runs managed GitHub Actions runners alongside managed Postgres and Kubernetes, competing primarily on price-performance and on being open and portable.