CloudBees: Solution Overview, Pricing & Limitations [2025]

What Is CloudBees?

CloudBees is a provider of DevOps and software development automation solutions. It offers tools and services that support continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) tasks, helping organizations accelerate their software delivery pipelines. At its core, CloudBees provides enterprise-grade management for the popular Jenkins CI server. Jenkins has acquired several other technologies that automate other stages of the software delivery process.

Key capabilities of the CloudBees platform include release orchestration, feature flag management, and CI/CD pipeline automation, all of which help organizations optimize their software development lifecycle (SDLC). Additionally, CloudBees supports cloud-native architectures and offers advanced analytics for tracking DevOps performance.

History and Evolution of CloudBees 

CloudBees was founded in 2010 by Sacha Labourey, who previously served as CTO of JBoss. Initially, the company focused on providing a cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution for Java applications. As the DevOps landscape evolved, CloudBees shifted its strategy to focus on CI/CD solutions.

In 2011, the company began offering Jenkins support services. Jenkins, an open-source automation server, quickly became central to CloudBees’ product offerings. By 2014, CloudBees discontinued its PaaS services to concentrate fully on enterprise Jenkins-based CI/CD solutions.

Over the years, CloudBees expanded its capabilities through acquisitions and new product developments. In 2018, it acquired Electric Cloud, and used it as the basis for its release orchestration and deployment automation product, CloudBees CD/RO. 

The company also acquired CodeShip in 2018 to provide CI/CD solutions for smaller organizations, and Rollout.io in 2019 to improve its feature flagging and feature management capabilities.

CloudBees Products and Services 

CloudBees CI

CloudBees Continuous Integration (CI) is an enterprise-level CI solution built on Jenkins, to optimize and scale CI practices across development teams. It enables organizations to manage Jenkins more effectively by providing features like centralized configuration, security controls, and analytics. 

CloudBees CI helps reduce infrastructure costs by enabling shared and scalable CI pipelines, providing teams with greater control and visibility into their build processes. With integrations across major development tools, it supports scalable and automated builds and tests.

CloudBees CD/RO

CloudBees Continuous Delivery and Release Orchestration (CD/RO) (formerly Electric Cloud) provides automated and controlled deployment and release management capabilities. This tool enables organizations to automate, manage, and visualize complex software release pipelines, ensuring consistent and reliable deployments across different environments. 

The solution supports release orchestration, deployment automation, and environment management, allowing teams to coordinate and track changes from development to production. It aims to reduce manual errors, improves release predictability, and enhances compliance and auditability within release processes.

CloudBees Feature Management

CloudBees Feature Management provides a framework for feature flagging and feature experimentation, allowing developers to control which users see new features and gather feedback on their impact. 

This tool supports gradual rollouts, A/B testing, and targeted deployments, enabling organizations to release new functionality with minimal risk. It allows teams to deploy changes to production while keeping them hidden from end-users until they’re ready.

CloudBees CodeShip

CloudBees CodeShip is a cloud-based CI/CD solution aimed at simplifying CI/CD processes, particularly for smaller businesses or teams seeking a straightforward CI/CD setup. CodeShip provides setup and easy integration with major cloud platforms and DevOps tools. 

CodeShip offers two versions: CodeShip Basic, for simple workflows, and CodeShip Pro, which supports Docker and custom workflows for more complex CI/CD requirements.

CloudBees Cloud-Native Platform

The CloudBees Cloud-Native Platform provides a unified DevOps environment that supports cloud-native applications and microservices. Built for Kubernetes environments, this platform allows teams to manage, deploy, and scale their applications in cloud environments. It integrates with Kubernetes for container orchestration and provides CI/CD tooling optimized for microservices architectures.

Key Features and Functionalities of the CloudBees Platform 

Centralized Jenkins Management

CloudBees offers Jenkins management capabilities, which are essential for organizations using Jenkins at scale. With centralized configuration and security controls, administrators can streamline the management of Jenkins instances across multiple teams and projects. This feature also includes monitoring and troubleshooting tools that enhance visibility into CI/CD workflows, enabling quick identification and resolution of bottlenecks or failures.

Pipeline Automation and Orchestration

CloudBees provides pipeline automation tools that enable teams to design, deploy, and manage complex workflows. The platform supports multi-stage pipelines that automate steps from code integration to deployment, reducing manual interventions and errors. Through release orchestration, CloudBees provides a single interface for managing releases across diverse environments.

Security and Compliance

CloudBees emphasizes security across the software delivery lifecycle. Role-based access control, audit trails, and compliance management are integrated to ensure that only authorized personnel have access to critical systems and data. Additionally, CloudBees includes features for enforcing security policies within pipelines, such as automated scans and security checks, ensuring compliance with industry standards and regulations.

Multi-Environment Management

CloudBees supports scalable architecture to meet the needs of both small development teams and large, enterprise-scale operations. It allows teams to build CI/CD processes that adapt as project demands grow, providing options for both on-premises and cloud deployments. With options to integrate with Kubernetes, Docker, and other cloud-native tools, CloudBees enables users to build and scale CI/CD processes across modern and legacy environments.

Analytics and Reporting

CloudBees includes real-time analytics and reporting tools that help track the effectiveness of CI/CD processes. These analytics dashboards deliver metrics on build success rates, pipeline efficiency, deployment frequency, and mean time to recovery (MTTR), offering a data-driven approach to optimize delivery performance. 

CloudBees Pricing 

CloudBees offers three pricing plans:

  • Free plan: This plan includes up to 2,000 workflow execution minutes per month, supports up to five users, and provides community support. It offers one week of log retention, CI insights for one Jenkins controller, and feature management for up to 100,000 client-side users.
  • Team plan: Priced at $30 per user per month, the Team plan includes 10,000 workflow execution minutes per month and supports up to 25 team members with unlimited sub-organizations. It offers essentials support, 12 months of log retention, CI insights for up to three Jenkins controllers, and feature management for up to 250,000 client-side users.
  • Enterprise plan: Tailored for larger organizations, the Enterprise plan offers customizable features, including flexible workflow execution minutes, advanced or premier support, custom log retention, CI insights for unlimited Jenkins controllers, and feature management with custom client-side user limits. Pricing is customized based on specific requirements.

CloudBees Limitations 

While CloudBees offers a respected suite of DevOps tools, organizations should be aware of certain limitations, as reported by users on the G2 platform:

  1. Cost considerations: CloudBees’ paid plans can be expensive compared to competitors, which may be a concern for smaller organizations or startups with limited budgets.
  2. Complexity and learning curve: The platform’s functionality can introduce complexity, requiring a significant learning curve, especially for teams without prior Jenkins experience.
  3. Customization constraints: Some users have reported limitations in customization, which could affect the platform’s adaptability to specific organizational workflows or integration with certain third-party applications.
  4. Integration challenges: Integrating CloudBees with existing systems, particularly legacy applications, may present challenges, requiring additional configuration and maintenance efforts.
  5. Resource requirements: Deploying and maintaining CloudBees solutions can demand substantial infrastructure resources, which might be a consideration for organizations with constrained IT capabilities.
  6. Support and documentation: Some users have noted that certain areas in CloudBees documentation are unclear and made implementation and troubleshooting more difficult.

Codefresh: A Modern Alternative to Jenkins

You can’t get to continuous delivery or deployment without first solving continuous integration. Codefresh automatically creates a Delivery Pipeline, which is a workflow along with the events that trigger it. We’ve added a pipeline creation wizard that will create all the component configurations so you can spend less time with YAML and more time getting work done.

At the end of the pipeline creation wizard, Codefresh commits the configuration to git and allows its built-in Argo CD instance to deploy them to Kubernetes.

The Delivery pipeline model also allows the creation of a single reusable pipeline that lets DevOps teams build once and use everywhere. Each step in a workflow operates in its own container and pod. This allows pipelines to take advantage of the distributed architecture of Kubernetes to easily scale both on the number of running workflows and within each workflow itself.

Codefresh Delivery Pipelines

Teams that adopt Codefresh deploy more often, with greater confidence, and are able to resolve issues in production much more quickly. This is because we unlock the full potential of Argo to create a single cohesive software supply chain. For users of traditional CI/CD tooling, the fresh approach to software delivery is dramatically easier to adopt, more scalable, and much easier to manage with the unique hybrid model.

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Deploy more and fail less with Codefresh and Argo