GitLab vs GitHub Actions: Enterprise Pricing Compared (2026)

For most teams, GitHub Actions costs less to start with. You pay for GitHub seats and get a monthly allowance of CI compute, then pay per minute beyond it, starting at $0.006 a minute on a standard Linux runner. GitLab bundles CI into its per-user plans, with a larger minute allowance on paid tiers, and more built-in security and compliance features in Ultimate. Which one is cheaper depends mostly on three things: how many developers you have, how many CI minutes you burn, and whether you run your own runners.

Prices below are list prices for the cloud (SaaS) versions as published in 2026. Both vendors change pricing from time to time, and enterprise deals are often negotiated, so confirm on the official pricing pages before you budget.

How each one charges

GitHub Actions

• Seats: GitHub Team or GitHub Enterprise Cloud, priced per user per month.
• Included compute each month is expressed in dollars: $18 on Team and $300 on Enterprise Cloud. At the Linux rate, that’s about 3,000 and 50,000 Linux minutes respectively.
• Per-minute rates for standard hosted runners: Linux 2-core $0.006, Windows 2-core $0.010, macOS $0.062.
• Public repositories use standard hosted runners for free. Larger runners are still billed.
• Self-hosted runners are free to use and don’t count against your included compute.

GitLab CI/CD

• Seats: GitLab Premium is $29 per user per month, billed annually. Ultimate is sold through sales, with pricing that depends on the deal.
• Included compute minutes on GitLab.com: Free 400 a month, Premium 10,000 a month, and Ultimate 50,000 a month. Extra minutes can be bought as add-on packs.
• Different runner types, such as larger Linux, Windows or macOS machines, use minutes at a higher rate through cost factors.
• Your own runners don’t use compute minutes at all.

Side-by-side

A worked example

Take a 25-person team on Linux runners using 40,000 CI minutes a month, with no self-hosted runners.

• GitHub Team: the $18 included compute covers about 3,000 minutes. The remaining ~37,000 minutes at $0.006 come to about $222 a month in Actions, on top of the Team seat cost.
• GitLab Premium: 25 × $29 = $725 a month in seats, including 10,000 minutes. The other ~30,000 minutes would need add-on packs.

The answer changes quickly if you add self-hosted runners. With your own runners, CI minutes become nearly free on both platforms, and the comparison comes down to seat prices and features. Heavy macOS usage pushes costs up fastest on GitHub, because macOS minutes cost about ten times the Linux rate.

Hidden costs to budget for

• Storage: artifacts, caches and packages have their own allowances on both platforms, and long retention adds up.
• Security features: on GitHub, code and secret scanning for private repos are paid add-ons. On GitLab, the fuller security suite sits in Ultimate.
• Runner infrastructure: self-hosted runners are free to the platform, but you pay for the servers or cloud instances and the time to maintain them.
• Seats for occasional users: reviewers and contractors count as seats on both.

Which should you choose?

GitHub Actions tends to fit teams whose code already lives on GitHub, who want a huge marketplace of ready-made actions, and who mostly run Linux builds. It also suits teams that want to pay for CI by the minute rather than by the seat.

GitLab tends to fit teams that want source control, CI/CD, security scanning and planning in one product. It’s also a good match for regulated industries that value Ultimate’s compliance features, and for organisations that prefer predictable per-user pricing with a larger bundle of minutes.

Before deciding, pull last quarter’s CI usage, split by runner OS, and price it with both vendors’ calculators. That ten-minute exercise beats any general comparison.