Depot alternatives

What Depot does well

• Excellent remote Docker build performance with persistent layer cache
• Native multi-platform builds without QEMU emulation
• Simple, well-designed developer experience

Where we differ

• Docker-first — less compelling when your bottleneck is tests, not images
• Narrower runner matrix than platforms leading with general-purpose CI

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.
• Blacksmith — 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.
• 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.
• 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.