Blacksmith alternatives for GitHub Actions runners
Every runner on this page runs your existing GitHub Actions workflows, so trying one means changing a job's runner label once the provider is connected. They differ in price, where the machine runs, which operating systems they cover, how the cache works and how long the same build takes. We build Avrea, one of the options below. Prices come from each vendor's own pages and build results from RunsOn's public benchmark, checked 4 November 2026.
Try AvreaWhich alternative to pick
- Avrea, if build time matters most. It had the fastest ARM builds in RunsOn's November benchmark, tied for the fastest x86 Rust build, and charges Blacksmith's x86 rate.
- Ubicloud, if the per-minute rate matters most.
- RunsOn or WarpBuild, if runners have to run in your own cloud account.
- Depot, WarpBuild or Namespace, if you want remote Docker builders.
- GitHub's larger runners, if you'd rather keep CI with one vendor.
Prices for a 2-vCPU Linux runner
Avrea, Blacksmith and WarpBuild charge $0.004 a minute for a 2-vCPU x86 runner with 8 GB, and Namespace charges the same within a paid plan. ARM prices vary more, partly because the hardware does.
| Provider | x86 | ARM | Plan fee | Included |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blacksmith | $0.004 | $0.0025 | None | 3,000 minutes |
| Avrea | $0.004 | $0.012 | None | 3,000 minutes |
| Depot | $0.006 | $0.006 | $20 or $200 | 2,000 or 20,000 minutes |
| WarpBuild | $0.004 | $0.003 | None | Not stated |
| Namespace | $0.004 in plan | Not listed | $0 or $100 | 25,000 minutes on Team |
| Ubicloud | $0.00125 | $0.00125 | None | $2.50 credit |
| RunsOn | AWS price | AWS price | From €300 a year | 15-day trial |
| GitHub-hosted | $0.006 | $0.005 | GitHub plan | $12 to $300 of usage |
Prices are per minute for a 2-vCPU Linux runner with 8 GB; Blacksmith's and Ubicloud's ARM runners have 6 GB. Depot's plans are $20 for one user and $200 for unlimited users. Namespace charges $0.006 beyond a paid plan's included minutes, and its $100 Team plan's 100,000 unit minutes cover 25,000 minutes at this size. Ubicloud's premium x86 runners cost $0.002.
Avrea's ARM runners are Apple M5 Max machines. The other generally available ARM runners here use server processors such as Graviton4, AmpereOne and Ampere Altra. The build results below show what that difference does to job time, and a job that finishes sooner bills fewer minutes.
Rates exclude storage, add-ons and enterprise terms. Where a plan includes minutes, they are counted at the 2-vCPU size, and each provider converts larger, ARM, Windows and macOS runners at its own ratio. Avrea and Depot meter jobs by the second; GitHub rounds each job up to a whole minute. Standard GitHub-hosted runners are free in public repositories.
On macOS, Avrea's smallest runner has 8 vCPU and 24 GB on Apple M5 Max for $0.08 a minute. Blacksmith (M4) and WarpBuild (M4 Pro) charge the same for 6 vCPU, and Depot for 8 vCPU. Namespace starts at $0.04 for 4 vCPU within a plan, and GitHub's standard macOS runner is $0.062. Ubicloud and RunsOn have no macOS runners.
Sources: Blacksmith pricing and runner specifications, Avrea pricing, Depot pricing and runner types, WarpBuild pricing, Namespace pricing, Ubicloud pricing, RunsOn pricing, GitHub runner rates and included usage.
Build and cache results at 4 vCPU
RunsOn, a runner vendor that also appears in the table, runs a public benchmark that builds the same projects on every provider's runners, with its workflows and method published. The 1 November 2026 run built two projects from a cold start on 4-vCPU, 16-GB runners: the Rust project spotify-player, with its tests and clippy, and PostHog's production Docker image. The table shows median build times from five runs, and the median time to restore a 4 GB file through actions/cache in the 2 November cache test. Depot is not in the benchmark.
| 4-vCPU runner | Rust, x86 | Rust, ARM | Docker, x86 | Docker, ARM | Cache, x86 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Avrea | 91 s | 76 s | 292 s | 286 s | 11 s |
| Blacksmith | 100 s | 264 s | 301 s | 670 s | 13 s |
| Namespace | 91 s | 332 s | 280 s | 801 s | 18 s |
| WarpBuild | 136 s | 182 s | 439 s | 602 s | 28 s |
| RunsOn | 99 s | 106 s | 398 s | 384 s | 8 s |
| GitHub-hosted | 221 s | 196 s | 773 s | 585 s | 46 s |
| Ubicloud | 144 s | 331 s | 645 s | 823 s | 70 s |
Avrea had the fastest ARM build in both projects: 3.5 times faster than Blacksmith on the Rust build and 2.3 times faster on the Docker image. On x86, Avrea and Namespace tied on the Rust build, Namespace built the Docker image 12 seconds sooner, and Blacksmith finished both builds 9 seconds behind Avrea. Avrea also restored the cache fastest of the hosted providers. These builds start without a warm cache, so they measure the machine and its network rather than cache reuse.
Namespace's ARM row is its AmpereOne runner; its Apple silicon Linux runner, in early access, built the two projects in 86 and 305 seconds. RunsOn's row is its fastest EC2 instance with an EBS or local NVMe disk in each test, and Ubicloud's is its standard runner. Namespace's and WarpBuild's cache times use GitHub's cache service, because their own caches need a different action. Where a run failed, the median covers the successful runs.
Data: RunsOn, benchmarks and cache results, CC BY 4.0. We selected the 4-vCPU rows.
The alternatives
Avrea
We build Avrea. It runs GitHub Actions jobs on dedicated machines: Linux x86, Linux ARM and macOS on Apple M5 Max, and Windows Server 2025. At the same x86 rate as Blacksmith it finished both x86 builds above sooner, and its ARM runner had the fastest ARM builds in the benchmark.
Supported actions/cache calls go to Avrea's cache without workflow changes, with 25 GB per repository shared across Actions, LFS, build and package caches. Integrations for Turborepo, Gradle, Bazel, Nx, Go and sccache let a cache hit skip compilation or tests, and persistent disks keep Docker builder state between jobs for $0.50 per provisioned GB a month. Each job has searchable logs, CPU and memory metrics and SSH, and workflow analytics track failure and flake rates. Avrea AI, in beta, proposes a fix for a failing job and runs your tests on it before opening a pull request.
GitHits moved its CI from Blacksmith to Avrea and reported 27% faster median test feedback while its test suite grew 22%. The team also split its pipeline into parallel stages during the move. Avrea is ISO 27001:2022 certified and SOC 2 Type II attested. Read the GitHits case study or the full Avrea and Blacksmith comparison.
Depot
Depot pairs its runners with remote Docker builders. depot build and depot/build-push-action send the build to a remote 16-CPU BuildKit machine with a persistent layer cache, billed at $0.04 a minute after the plan's 500 or 5,000 included minutes. Its runners charge the same rate for x86 (AMD EPYC) and ARM (Graviton4) and come with a $20 single-user or $200 unlimited-user plan. Depot Cache also serves Bazel, Gradle, Turborepo, Nx and sccache. The runners work only for repositories owned by a GitHub organization, and Depot's docs note longer macOS queues at busy times. Avrea vs Depot.
WarpBuild
WarpBuild can deploy runners into your own AWS, GCP or Azure account for $0.002 a minute plus the cloud bill, with cache and snapshots included. Its hosted runners match Blacksmith's x86 rate, macOS runs on M4 Pro, and remote Docker builders start at 16 vCPU for $0.06 a minute. To use WarpBuild's own cache on hosted runners, you replace actions/cache with warpbuilds/cache; storage and operations are billed separately. Avrea vs WarpBuild.
Namespace
Namespace sells runners, remote Docker builders, cache volumes and devboxes from one account. Prices are set in unit minutes: a 2-vCPU, 8-GB Linux runner costs $0.004 a minute within a paid plan and $0.006 beyond it, and the Team plan is $100 a month. GitHub's cache keeps working unchanged; Namespace's NVMe cache volumes need its cache action and a few workflow edits. Linux ARM runs on AmpereOne, with Apple silicon Linux in early access, and Windows needs the Team plan or above. Avrea vs Namespace.
Ubicloud
Ubicloud's managed runners are part of an open-source cloud platform and have the lowest hosted rate here, $0.00125 a minute for a standard 2-vCPU runner on x86 or ARM. Premium x86 runners cost $0.002, and new accounts get them by default. The transparent cache works without workflow changes and includes 30 GB per repository. Jobs run in European data centres by default, and there are no macOS or Windows runners. Avrea vs Ubicloud.
RunsOn
RunsOn starts a fresh EC2 instance in your own AWS account for each job, from one CloudFormation stack. You pay AWS for the instances and a small control plane, and RunsOn a flat licence from €300 a year for under 50,000 jobs a month; it is free for non-profit, open-source and personal non-commercial projects. RunsOn's own calculator puts a 4-vCPU spot instance at $0.0014 a minute in us-east-1, before the licence and control plane. Linux and Windows run on x86, ARM and GPU instances, and macOS jobs stay on GitHub's runners. You manage the AWS account and its capacity.
GitHub-hosted runners
Staying on GitHub keeps CI with one vendor and one bill. Standard 2-core Linux runners are free in public repositories and $0.006 a minute in private ones. Larger runners need a Team or Enterprise Cloud plan, are billed in public repositories too, and cost $0.012 a minute for 4-core x86 and $0.008 for 4-core ARM. Each plan includes $12 to $300 of usage a month. Avrea vs GitHub-hosted runners.
Self-hosted runners with Actions Runner Controller
Actions Runner Controller runs GitHub's self-hosted runner on your own Kubernetes cluster. GitHub doesn't charge for self-hosted runner minutes, so the cost is the cluster and the time it takes to run it: images, autoscaling, cache storage and security updates are yours.
When staying on Blacksmith makes sense
Blacksmith's Actions cache needs no workflow changes and includes 25 GB per repository at no extra charge, and its runners are available in four regions across the US and Europe. Its 2-vCPU ARM rate, $0.0025 a minute, is the lowest here after Ubicloud's, which suits ARM jobs that spend more time waiting than computing.
Moving means replacing any useblacksmith/* Docker or sticky-disk steps, and the first runs elsewhere start with a cold cache.
Common questions
Which is the fastest Blacksmith alternative?
Avrea, in RunsOn's 1 November 2026 run on 4-vCPU runners. It had the fastest ARM builds of both projects, tied Namespace for the fastest x86 Rust build and restored the cache fastest of the hosted providers. Namespace built the x86 Docker image 12 seconds sooner than Avrea. Depot is not in the benchmark.
Is Avrea faster than Blacksmith?
In the same run, Avrea finished both x86 builds 9 seconds ahead of Blacksmith at the same x86 per-minute rate. On ARM, Avrea was 3.5 times faster on the Rust build and 2.3 times faster on the Docker image. GitHits reported 27% faster median test feedback after moving from Blacksmith, a move during which it also split its pipeline into parallel stages.
What is the cheapest alternative to Blacksmith?
Per minute, Ubicloud's standard runners: $0.00125 for 2 vCPU on x86 or ARM. With your own AWS account, RunsOn on spot instances can cost less, plus its annual licence. Per job, speed counts as well: Avrea charges Blacksmith's x86 rate and finished the same x86 builds sooner, so the same job bills fewer minutes.
Which Blacksmith alternatives run in my own cloud account?
RunsOn runs in your AWS account. WarpBuild deploys runners into AWS, GCP or Azure for $0.002 a minute plus your cloud bill. Depot offers deployment into your AWS account on its Business plan. Actions Runner Controller runs on any Kubernetes cluster you operate. Avrea, Namespace and Ubicloud are hosted services; Avrea's Enterprise plan adds an egress firewall and static IPs for teams that need network controls.
Which alternatives have macOS runners?
Avrea runs macOS 26 on Apple M5 Max at 8 and 16 vCPU. Depot runs macOS 26 on M4 at 8 vCPU, WarpBuild runs M4 Pro at 6 and 12 vCPU, Namespace offers Apple silicon from 4 vCPU, and GitHub has standard and larger macOS runners. Ubicloud and RunsOn don't run macOS.
How do I move a workflow off Blacksmith?
Change the job's runs-on label to the new provider's, for example avrea-ubuntu-latest for Avrea's 2-vCPU, 8-GB x86 runner. On Avrea, the console's migration wizard converts a workflow and opens the pull request for you. Replace any useblacksmith/* steps with the standard Docker actions or the new provider's equivalent. Expect the first runs to rebuild caches from scratch, and compare a cold run, a repeat of the same commit and a typical change before deciding.
Try one job on Avrea
Connect a repository with the setup guide, then change one job's runner label. Run the same commits on both providers and compare duration and cost, including a cold cache.
Prices and documentation checked 4 November 2026. Benchmark results from RunsOn, 1 and 2 November 2026.
