GitHub Actions alternatives: 8 ways to replace or secure unvetted actions

Unvetted GitHub Marketplace actions introduce third-party code into CI/CD workflows, creating inherent security risks. But that doesn’t mean your only option is to replace the entire GitHub Actions platform.

Teams can replace individual actions, govern and update the actions they retain, add runtime controls, or move to a CI/CD platform with a different operating model. These approaches aren’t interchangeable, but most are complementary and can be layered together to create a more robust security framework.

GitHub Actions alternatives at a glance

The first five options keep you on GitHub Actions and each address a different layer of risk. The last three replace GitHub Actions as your CI/CD platform.

Switching platforms doesn't remove third-party code risk: GitLab components, CircleCI orbs, and Buildkite plugins also need review and version control.

How to compare GitHub Actions alternatives

When choosing among these options, evaluate each against four questions:

1. Which layer needs to change: the action’s implementation, its approved revision, how updates are adopted, its runtime behavior, or the CI/CD platform?

2. Who will review releases, test updates, maintain policies, and respond to unexpected behavior?

3. Does the option cover the actions, repositories, and runner environments your organization uses?

4. What will adoption cost beyond licensing, including workflow changes, infrastructure, and ongoing maintenance?

GitHub Actions alternatives that don’t require migrating

Chainguard Actions: Best for hardening popular GitHub Actions

What is Chainguard Actions?

Chainguard Actions, currently in beta, provides hardened replacements for popular GitHub Actions without requiring teams to migrate to another CI/CD platform. Each action is built from source and evaluated through Chainguard’s hardening pipeline while preserving the upstream action’s inputs and outputs wherever possible.

Standout features

• Chainguard pins every internal action and container image reference to an immutable SHA or digest. This extends protection beyond the action referenced directly in a workflow, since pinning only the top-level action does not prevent one of its internal dependencies from changing through a movable tag.

• Each action includes a HARDENING.md report that documents what Chainguard evaluated and changed. Actions are re-hardened when a new upstream version is published and reevaluated when Chainguard updates its hardening rules. Each hardening run generates a new report that identifies the rules applied.

• The Chainguard Guardener GitHub app can recommend hardened replacements in pull request comments or maintain a migration pull request that updates eligible workflows. Teams can enable either mode independently or use both together.

Who should use Chainguard Actions?

Chainguard Actions is best suited to teams that want to retain GitHub Actions while transferring the recurring work of hardening commonly used actions to a maintained provider. Its usefulness depends on whether the Chainguard catalog covers the actions your team relies on.

What should you consider before adopting?

Chainguard designs its Actions as drop-in replacements, but hardening can occasionally change an action’s behavior. Before broader adoption, review the action’s HARDENING.md report, test the replacement in a representative workflow, and update any GitHub allowed-actions policy to permit chainguard-actions/*.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Chainguard Actions is currently in beta. Contact Chainguard for access and pricing.

Manual review, allowlists, and SHA pinning: Best for a small approved action set

What is manual review and SHA pinning?

Instead of adding a separate product to your stack, you can use GitHub-native governance tools to combine source review, an allowed-actions policy, and full-length commit SHA pins. Allowlisting and pinning preserve a trust decision, but neither makes unreviewed code trustworthy.

Standout features

• Administrators can restrict workflows to selected actions and reusable workflows, including specific organizations, repositories, tags, or commit SHAs.

• A full-length commit SHA provides an immutable action reference, preventing a moved tag from selecting different code.

• Administrators can require full-SHA references for actions at the repository or organization level.

Who should use manual review and SHA pinning?

If your action inventory is small enough for your team to review and maintain at the source level, this is a good starting place. It also provides a solid baseline even if you later adopt hardened replacements or runtime monitoring.

What should you consider before adopting?

Review each action's source before approving it. For example, an action used only to identify changed files should have a clear reason for everything it executes, fetches, and accesses. If you can't confidently review its implementation, choose a narrower implementation or maintained hardening instead.

GitHub's full-SHA enforcement also doesn't extend to reusable workflows, which can still be referenced by tag, so govern those references separately.

Pros and cons

Pricing

There is no separate product to license for this approach, but account for the internal engineering and security review time it requires, along with the team’s existing GitHub plan and Actions runner usage.

Custom actions: Best for organization-specific automation

What are custom actions?

Custom actions on GitHub are reusable units of automation that your organization develops and maintains internally. GitHub supports JavaScript, Docker container, and composite actions. Composite actions package multiple workflow steps into a single reusable step, while JavaScript and Docker actions support more specialized implementations.

Standout features

• Standardize organization-specific logic behind documented inputs and outputs. (For example, a centrally maintained release-validation action can apply the same organizational rules across multiple repositories instead of duplicating similar workflow code.)

• Share actions from private or internal repositories without publishing them publicly. The team controls the implementation, review process, release schedule, and versions available to consuming workflows.

• Composite actions can wrap approved, SHA-pinned third-party actions behind a single internal interface, so a pin can be updated in one place instead of in every repository.

Who should use custom actions?

Custom actions are best suited to organizations with recurring, org-specific automation or security requirements that maintained public actions don’t adequately address. They’re particularly valuable when multiple repositories need to reuse the same policy-sensitive logic, such as release validation, artifact signing, or compliance checks.

What should you consider before adopting?

Assign a maintainer, test changes, and define how workflows receive new versions. If an action invokes another action, installs a package, downloads a binary, or uses a container image, make sure to review and pin those dependencies wherever possible. Internal ownership does not eliminate third-party supply chain risk.

A custom action also doesn't create a separate permission boundary. The consuming workflow is still responsible for limiting the GITHUB_TOKEN permissions, secrets, and other credentials available to the job the action runs in.

Pros and cons

Pricing

There is no separate product to license, though you should consider the potential for extra costs around development, security review, dependency maintenance, and support for consuming teams.

Dependabot version updates: Best for keeping action references current

What are Dependabot version updates?

Dependabot version updates is a native GitHub feature that checks the GitHub Actions and reusable workflow references in a repository's workflow files. When Dependabot identifies a newer version, it opens a pull request that proposes an update to the reference.

Standout features

• Supports action references that use either version tags or full commit SHAs, allowing teams to combine immutable pins with automated update proposals.

• Updates arrive as pull requests, keeping version changes visible within the repository’s existing review and testing process.

• Teams can configure the check frequency and other update behavior in .github/dependabot.yml

  using the github-actions package ecosystem.

Who should use Dependabot version updates?

Dependabot version updates is a strong fit for teams that want to keep their third-party GitHub Actions and reusable workflows current without allowing references to change automatically. It’s particularly useful alongside SHA pinning, since workflows retain an immutable reference while Dependabot surfaces successor versions for review.

What should you consider before adopting?

Assign ownership for reviewing release notes, relevant code changes, and workflow test results before merging an update. A Dependabot pull request identifies an available version, but it does not establish that the new action code is trustworthy or compatible with your workflows.

You should also keep version updates conceptually separate from Dependabot alerts. For GitHub Actions, vulnerability alerts cover references using semantic versions, not SHA-pinned references. Enabling version updates for a SHA pin does not provide equivalent advisory-based alert coverage.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Dependabot version updates are free on all GitHub repositories and don’t require a GitHub Code Security or any other paid add-on.

StepSecurity Harden-Runner: Best for runtime visibility and egress controls

What is StepSecurity Harden-Runner?

Harden-Runner provides runtime monitoring and outbound network controls for CI/CD jobs. It records outbound network calls, process executions, and file writes and correlates them with individual workflow steps. It can also restrict outbound connections to approved destinations. It monitors what the code actually does during execution and helps enforce controls.

Standout features

• Provides step-level visibility into network, process, and file activity, which helps teams trace unexpected behavior to the workflow component that produced it.

• Audit mode records outbound traffic to help teams build an egress allowlist; block mode then enforces it.

• On GitHub-hosted runners, Harden-Runner is added as the first step in each job. StepSecurity also supports self-hosted runners through separate agent-based deployment options.

Who should use StepSecurity Harden-Runner?

Harden-Runner is best suited to teams that need runtime visibility or outbound network enforcement for sensitive CI/CD jobs, particularly workflows that handle credentials, proprietary source code, release artifacts, or deployment access. It is most practical when workflows have sufficiently predictable network behavior for the team to distinguish approved destinations from unexpected connections.

What should you consider before adopting?

Start in audit mode and observe several representative workflow runs before enforcing an allowlist. Investigate unexpected connections, identify legitimate destinations, and assign an owner to maintain policies as build dependencies and external services change.

You should also confirm compatibility with your runner environment during the pilot. Current limitations apply to ubuntu-slim, jobs running entirely inside containers on standard GitHub-hosted runners, and non-Linux jobs on Actions Runner Controller deployments.

Pros and cons

Pricing

StepSecurity’s Community plan is free for unlimited public repositories using GitHub-hosted runners on GitHub Cloud. The Enterprise plan is listed at $16 per contributing developer per month and covers private repositories, GitHub Enterprise Server, and self-hosted runners. Volume discounts are available for teams with more than 100 developers.

Alternative CI/CD platforms to GitHub Actions

Migrating away from GitHub Actions makes sense when your organization needs a broader change to its development or CI/CD operating model, not just a safer way to use third-party automation. Another platform may better support consolidating source control and CI/CD, distributing standardized pipeline configuration, or controlling where and how builds execute.

One important note when you’re evaluating these platforms: migration does not eliminate third-party software supply chain risk. GitLab CI/CD components, CircleCI orbs, and Buildkite plugins can also execute code during builds and require appropriate review, version controls, and ownership.

GitLab CI/CD: Best for teams consolidating in GitLab

What is GitLab CI/CD?

GitLab CI/CD runs pipelines that are defined alongside the project’s source code. These pipelines contain jobs that execute on GitLab-hosted or self-managed runners and can organize work such as building, testing, security scanning, and deployment.

Standout features

• Protected runners can be limited to jobs from protected branches or tags. Protected CI/CD variables can similarly restrict credentials to pipelines running against protected references.

• GitLab’s CI/CD components provide reusable pipeline configuration. Components can be referenced by commit SHA or release version, although third-party components still require source review and dependency governance.

• Teams can use GitLab-hosted compute or operate self-managed runners when they need greater control over the execution environment.

Who should use GitLab CI/CD?

GitLab CI/CD is ideal for teams that already use — or plan to migrate their development workflow to — GitLab and want to keep their source control, code review, pipeline execution, and security controls on the same platform.

What should you consider before migrating?

Pilot a representative pipeline that includes testing, artifact handling, and deployment. A migration to GitLab requires more than translating workflow syntax. Evaluate how GitHub Actions, secrets, permissions, caches, artifacts, environments, and approval gates map to GitLab jobs and components. Teams using self-managed runners must also design appropriate isolation, network access, patching, and lifecycle management.

Pros and cons

Pricing

GitLab offers Free, Premium, and Ultimate plans. Premium costs $29 per user per month when billed annually, while Ultimate uses custom pricing. The Free, Premium, and Ultimate plans currently include 400, 10,000, and 50,000 compute minutes per month, respectively.

CircleCI: Best for versioned shared CI configuration

What is CircleCI?

CircleCI is a CI/CD platform that runs repository-defined pipelines using cloud-hosted or self-hosted execution environments. Its orbs package reusable commands, jobs, and executor definitions that teams can share across projects.

Standout features

• Production registry orbs are immutable and use semantic versioning. Development orb versions are temporary and mutable.

• Organizations can publish private registry orbs for internal automation. Administrators must opt in before projects can use uncertified public orbs, while URL-based orbs can be limited through an organization allowlist.

• Contexts store environment variables for reuse across projects. Administrators can restrict a context by security group, project, and pipeline expressions such as the branch being built.

Who should use CircleCI?

CircleCI is best for platform teams that want to distribute standardized CI routines as versioned packages across multiple projects or operate CI independently from their source-code hosting platform.

What should you consider before migrating?

Teams should compare CircleCI’s model with GitHub reusable workflows, which also support centrally maintained automation and immutable commit references. Configuration reuse alone may not justify a migration.

You should also inventory existing workflows and determine how each action, trigger, secret, cache, artifact, approval gate, and execution environment maps to CircleCI configuration. Review third-party orbs as executable dependencies, and use exact production versions when workflows require deterministic behavior.

Pros and cons

Pricing

CircleCI’s Free plan includes up to five active users and 30,000 credits per month. (Credits cover active users, cloud compute, premium features, and some network and storage usage.) The Performance plan also includes 30,000 monthly credits and charges $15 for each additional 25,000-credit block. The Scale (Enterprise tier) plan uses custom pricing.

Buildkite: Best for teams that want more control over build infrastructure

What is Buildkite?

Buildkite is a CI/CD platform for orchestrating build, test, and deployment workflows. Its core CI/CD product, Buildkite Pipelines, uses a managed control plane to schedule work and display results, while Buildkite agents execute jobs on either Buildkite-hosted infrastructure or infrastructure your team operates.

With self-hosted agents, your team can keep source code and build credentials within your own environment. There’s also a fully managed execution option for teams that do not want to operate the underlying infrastructure.

Standout features

• Buildkite clusters group pipelines, agents, and queues into administrative and execution boundaries. Pipelines assigned to a cluster run only on agents connected to that cluster.

• Queues route jobs to groups of agents with particular capabilities, locations, or security requirements. Teams can separate workloads such as untrusted pull-request testing, release builds, and jobs requiring specialized hardware.

• Each Buildkite pipeline step receives its own workspace and can run on a different agent.

• Self-hosted agents can enforce plugin allowlists or disable plugins entirely. Buildkite also supports signed pipelines to prevent unverified pipeline modifications from reaching execution agents.

Who should use Buildkite?

Buildkite is best suited to teams that need dedicated agent pools, specialized hardware, or network-local builds, or that want tighter control over where source code and credentials are processed.

It’s important to note that GitHub also supports self-hosted runners and runner groups, so infrastructure ownership alone is not a reason to migrate. The stronger fit is an organization whose workload routing and security boundaries map naturally to Buildkite’s cluster-and-queue model. Teams that do not want to operate agents can evaluate Buildkite’s hosted option, but should treat it as a different infrastructure and security model from a self-hosted deployment.

What should you consider before migrating?

First, decide whether to use Buildkite-hosted or self-hosted agents. Self-hosting provides greater control over the execution environment but makes your team responsible for securing, scaling, and maintaining the agent fleet.

Pilot a representative workflow to test how your triggers, secrets, execution environments, plugins, and artifacts map to Buildkite. The GitHub Actions Buildkite plugin can support an incremental migration, but it continues to run referenced actions and therefore does not eliminate supply chain risks.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Buildkite plans include Free, Pro at $30 per active user per month, and custom Enterprise pricing. Pro includes 10 concurrent self-hosted agents; additional agents cost extra.

When considering the final price tag for a self-hosted deployment, include the underlying compute, storage, networking, and operations costs. For hosted agents, estimate usage by machine size and build duration in addition to the per-user subscription.

Next steps: Start with the narrowest effective change

Begin by identifying what actually needs to change: the actions your workflows rely on, how your team governs and updates them, what they can do at runtime, or the CI/CD platform itself. Choose the GitHub Actions alternative that addresses that need with the least unnecessary disruption, then test it in one representative workflow before expanding.

If your goal is to stay on GitHub Actions while reducing reliance on unvetted marketplace code, start by checking whether Chainguard Actions offers a maintained, hardened replacement for an action you already use.