Short answer
Depot was not measured in CI Bench v1, so the speed and cost-per-job figures below are each option's result against GitHub-hosted (ubuntu-latest), not against Depot. Measured managed options: Vitko Runners (warm starts + test splitting) 2.3x faster at 84% lower cost per job; Vitko Runners 1.7x faster at 84% lower cost per job; Blacksmith 1.6x faster at 52% lower cost per job; Ubicloud 1.1x faster at 83% lower cost per job. Maintained by Vitko, Inc., which sells one of the products measured.
What Depot publishes
Not measured in CI Bench v1: Depot runners were assigned but did not start jobs for our account during the test window (checks on 2026-10-01 and 2026-10-24), so there is no measured speed or cost-per-job figure for Depot.
| Topic | What its page says | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $0.006 a minute for 2 vCPU and 8 GB, $0.012 for 4 vCPU, $0.024 for 8 vCPU; billed per second. | Depot docs, runner types, read 2026-10-27 |
| Plans | Developer $20 a month with 2,000 GitHub Actions minutes; Startup $200 a month with 20,000. | Depot pricing, read 2026-10-27 |
| Hardware it describes | Ephemeral EC2 instances that are never reused; Intel runners on 4th Gen AMD EPYC Genoa CPUs, Arm runners on AWS Graviton4; a RAM-backed disk accelerator. | Depot docs, overview, read 2026-10-27 |
| Its own speed claim | "Up to 3x faster than a GitHub-hosted runner" and "10x faster caching". These are Depot's claims on its own page; we did not measure them. | Depot docs, overview, read 2026-10-27 |
| Limits it states | GitHub Actions runners support only repositories owned by GitHub organizations, not personal accounts. | Depot docs, overview, read 2026-10-27 |
Alternatives measured on 12 real CI workloads
| Configuration | Type | Speed vs GitHub-hosted (ubuntu-latest) | Cost per job vs GitHub-hosted (ubuntu-latest), 10,000 jobs a month | List $ per minute (2 vCPU) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vitko Runners (warm starts + test splitting)Vitko | Managed | 2.3x faster | 84% lower | $0.002 |
| Vitko RunnersVitko | Managed | 1.7x faster | 84% lower | $0.002 |
| GitHub-hosted larger runner (4 vCPU) | Managed | 1.6x faster | 39% higher | $0.012 |
| Blacksmith | Managed | 1.6x faster | 52% lower | $0.004 |
| Self-hosted runners on Google Cloud | Self-hosted | 1.5x faster | 59% lower | your cloud bill |
| RunsOn | Self-hosted | 1.2x faster | 75% lower | your cloud bill |
| Self-hosted runners on AWS (one VM per job) | Self-hosted | 1.2x faster | 60% lower | your cloud bill |
| Ubicloud | Managed | 1.1x faster | 83% lower | $0.00125 |
Speed and cost are the indexes in results.json (geometric mean over 12 workloads, each against GitHub-hosted (ubuntu-latest)); list prices dated 2026-10-05. List price per minute is not cost per job; faster runners finish sooner. Self-hosted options spread fixed monthly costs over the volume.
Other providers, published facts only
- WarpBuild: Not benchmarked List price $0.004 a minute (2 vCPU).
- Namespace: Not yet measured; joins in v2.
- BuildJet: Shut down (per its own docs, read 2026-10-24). List price $0.004 a minute (2 vCPU).
- Sengi: Not measured. List price $0.003 a minute (2 vCPU).
- CRACI: Not measured. List price $0.004 a minute (2 vCPU).
When another option may fit better
- If you need Arm or macOS runners as well as Ubuntu x64: check each provider’s platform list (Depot lists Arm and macOS runners; Vitko Runners is Ubuntu 24.04 on x64 only).
- If your repositories are owned by a personal account: Depot GitHub Actions runners support organization-owned repositories only, per its docs.
- If you want a lower per-minute rate for 2 vCPU: the table shows list prices side by side.
More: 12 options compared · ranked by speed · ranked by cost per job · price per minute, 2 and 4 vCPU · list prices · free minutes. Alternatives to: Blacksmith · Depot · RunsOn · Ubicloud · WarpBuild · Namespace · BuildJet.
Depot's pages may have changed since October 27, 2026; they are the authority. Method: how the runs were made; data: results.json; every raw record: the repository. Maintained by Vitko, Inc., which sells one of the products measured. Page dated October 27, 2026.