Jenkins Complexity: Why Jenkins Is Too Complex and How to Simplify It
- Abhishek Dutta
- Jan 7
- 5 min read
Updated: Jan 15
Your deployment failed on Friday, 4:47 PM. A Jenkins plugin conflict nobody could debug before the weekend. Three hours on Monday morning untangling it while your product team waited to ship.
This isn’t a Jenkins problem. It’s a scale problem.
At 8 developers, Jenkins made sense: free, flexible, battle-tested. At 50 engineers, that same tool starts to feel like a second job. The plugin ecosystem that promised infinite extensibility now delivers endless maintenance.
If you’re leading a growing engineering team and suddenly feel like “the old way” is fragile, you’re not alone.
In this post, you’ll learn why Jenkins breaks down at the 20–200 employee stage, why this isn’t a failure of skill or effort, and how to think about CI/CD differently as your company scales.
Who This Is For
This post is for:
Roles: CTOs, Heads of Engineering, DevOps Leads
Team size: 20–200 employees
Current setup: Jenkins, manual deployments, or heavily customized CI/CD pipelines
Situation: Shipping faster than before, but spending too much time keeping CI/CD alive
The Old Way: When "Free" Stopped Being Free
Jenkins commands roughly 45% of the market share in CI/CD tooling. Not because it’s the best tool today, but because it was the first good tool, and inertia is powerful.
But software development has fundamentally changed. You now ship to production 3–15 times per week, not once per quarter. CI/CD needs to be invisible infrastructure, not a system that demands constant attention.
The plugin ecosystem, once Jenkins’s biggest strength, has become its biggest liability. With over 2,000 plugins—many maintained by individual developers in their spare time—your production pipeline depends on unpaid maintainers in different time zones. When something breaks, you wait.
The architecture compounds the risk. Jenkins funnels everything through a central controller. When it goes down—memory leaks, plugin conflicts, accumulated configuration weight—your entire pipeline stops. A Friday incident becomes a weekend Jenkins archaeology expedition.
Where Jenkins Starts Costing More Than It Saves
With 8 engineers, Jenkins is manageable. Someone becomes “the Jenkins person.” A few hours a month keeping things running.
At 50 engineers, the math changes. Now you have multiple teams with different requirements. Every new need adds another plugin, another configuration file, another failure point.
The costs compound:
15–20 hours of maintenance per month becomes normal.
When Jenkins breaks, everyone stops shipping.
Pipelines grow into 3,000-line Groovy files that only two people understand. One leaves. The other is interviewing.
Plugin updates break pipelines, so teams delay them. Security issues pile up. Compliance flags it. Fixing it risks production, so it gets pushed to “next quarter.”
This is the expensive middle: Too big for Jenkins to be a side project. Too small to justify a dedicated platform team.
What CI/CD Should Do at This Stage
Most CI/CD conversations focus on features. That’s the wrong frame. The real question is:
What job are you hiring your CI/CD tool to do?
At the 20–200 employee stage, modern teams need three things:
Invisible Infrastructure: Your database doesn’t need weekly babysitting. CI/CD shouldn’t either. Setup should take hours, not weeks. Debugging should be predictable, not archaeological.
Predictable Economics: Jenkins looks free until you count engineering time. Cloud CI/CD looks simple until per-seat pricing explodes. Costs should scale with usage, not headcount or heroics.
Self-Hosted Without Self-Harm: You may need self-hosted CI/CD for compliance, security, or on-prem integration. But “self-hosted” shouldn’t mean “self-built”. Modern tools should give you ownership without requiring a platform engineering degree.
Outgrowing Infinite Flexibility
If those three principles resonate, you're facing a fundamental architectural choice:
Do you continue chasing infinite flexibility through plugins and custom code, accepting the maintenance burden?
— or —
Do you accept that some constraints might actually free your team to focus on shipping features instead of maintaining infrastructure?
This isn’t about finding “Jenkins, but nicer.” It’s about choosing different priorities.
How BuildNinja Aligns
BuildNinja was designed specifically for teams in this expensive middle, with deliberate trade-offs aligned to those three needs:
Fewer plugins → zero plugin conflicts
Opinionated workflows → predictable debugging
Constraints → faster onboarding and lower maintenance
The goal isn’t infinite customization. The goal is CI/CD that fades into the background and just works.
Trade-offs to Be Honest About
BuildNinja is not for every team. It doesn’t work well if:
You need enterprise SSO, LDAP, or advanced RBAC (not yet)
You want a fully managed SaaS with zero operational touch
You require bleeding-edge or highly experimental workflows
You have no infrastructure to run containers
These are intentional constraints, not oversights.
Why Some Teams Should Stay on Jenkins
Jenkins still wins in specific cases:
Very large teams (500+ engineers): At 500+ engineers with a dedicated platform team, infinite flexibility becomes an asset. You have resources to build internal tooling and handle operational complexity.
Highly custom or legacy workflows: Esoteric tools, legacy systems, workflows no modern CI/CD supports. Jenkins's plugin ecosystem gives you options newer tools don't.
Organizations that ignore operational cost: If you only count licensing and ignore operational overhead, Jenkins appears free. For companies that don't track engineering time carefully, this math works.
Jenkins isn’t bad. It’s just optimized for a different era and a different scale.
What This Decision Is Really About
This decision isn't about picking the most popular tool or the tool with the best marketing site. It's about protecting your team's ability to ship.
At 20–200 employees, every engineering hour matters. You're past scrappy startup heroics but not yet at the mature company phase with specialized teams for every function.
Your CI/CD should fade into the background: reliable, predictable, invisible until needed. The Jenkins complexity problem is really a scale problem. Jenkins was designed for a different era and company size.
The question isn’t:
Can we make Jenkins work?
It’s:
What’s the opportunity cost of continuing to make Jenkins work?
Key Takeaways
Jenkins complexity increases exponentially at the 20–200 employee stage.
Plugin flexibility creates hidden operational and security costs.
CI/CD tools should be evaluated by principles, not features.
Constraints can increase velocity and reliability.
Opportunity cost matters more than license cost.
What to Do Next
If this resonates with your situation, here are three practical next steps:
Audit your Jenkins costs honestly. Track how much time your team actually spends on Jenkins maintenance, debugging, and plugin management over the next month. Convert that to dollar cost. You might be surprised.
Start with the Solo Edition (free). Get the full BuildNinja experience with up to 10 users and 3 concurrent builds. No credit card, no time limit. Upgrade to Shogun when you need unlimited scale. 👉 Download Solo Edition
Review pricing when you’re ready. 👉 View pricing
Want to see how it works? You can watch a short walkthrough of setup and daily workflows here: 👉 Watch the 3-minute BuildNinja demo
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