Introduction
Why Blacksmith?
The fastest way to run your GitHub Actions
Blacksmith is a dead-simple, drop-in replacement that runs your GitHub Actions faster, costs 75% less than GitHub-hosted runners, and makes everything actually observable. Making it the best way to build, test, debug, and deploy to prod money can buy!
How does Blacksmith compare to GitHub-hosted and self-hosted runners?
| Blacksmith | GitHub | Self-hosted | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Performance | Highest single-core performance (2x faster runtime) | ✔ | ||
| Performance | Instant provisioning | ✔ | ||
| Performance | Unlimited concurrency | ✔ | ✔ | |
| Performance | Colocated dependency cache (4x faster downloads) | ✔ | ✔ | |
| Performance | Managed Docker pull cache | ✔ | ||
| Performance | Managed Docker layer cache (40x faster Docker Builds) | ✔ | ||
| Cost | Compute costs | low | high | low |
| Cost | Storage costs | low | low | low |
| Cost | Operational costs | low | low | high |
| Reliability | Few to no outages | ✔ | ||
| Security | Default security | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Observability | GitHub Actions, but actually observable | ✔ | ||
| Support | Fast, actually helpful support | ✔ | ||
| Happiness | Developers smile while using | ✔ |