Tenki vs. GitHub-Hosted Runners: Pricing, Specs, and What Ships with Your Build Minutes

GitHub-hosted runners are the path of least resistance. They're pre-configured, they're always available, and for most teams on the Free or Pro plan, they're included. But once you blow past the free minute quota on private repos or start reaching for 4-core and 8-core machines, the bill stops being invisible.

Tenki's managed runners compete directly on that bill. At $0.002 per core per minute for x64 Linux, they undercut GitHub's per-core rate by roughly a third at the 2-core and 4-core tiers. And they ship something GitHub runners don't: AI code review on every PR, integrated into the same platform, at $1 per review.

This piece breaks down both platforms across per-minute pricing, hardware, ARM64 and macOS support, and what each actually includes when your team is shipping agent-authored code at volume.

Per-Minute Pricing: The Core Comparison

GitHub revised its hosted runner pricing in January 2026, cutting rates by up to 39% across most machine types. Those revised rates are what we're comparing against. All figures below come from GitHub's Actions runner pricing docs and Tenki's pricing page, verified June 2026.

Linux x64 Runners

Tenki charges a flat $0.002 per core per minute for x64 Linux runners. GitHub's pricing varies by tier, and the per-core cost actually decreases as you scale up to larger machines.

2-core Linux: GitHub charges $0.006/min ($0.003/core/min). Tenki charges $0.004/min ($0.002/core/min). That's 33% cheaper.

4-core Linux: GitHub charges $0.012/min ($0.003/core/min). Tenki charges $0.008/min. Still 33% cheaper.

8-core Linux: GitHub charges $0.022/min ($0.00275/core/min). Tenki charges $0.016/min. About 27% cheaper.

16-core Linux: GitHub charges $0.042/min ($0.002625/core/min). Tenki charges $0.032/min. About 24% cheaper.

The pattern: Tenki's flat per-core rate gives the biggest advantage at the smaller tiers where most teams actually run their CI. As GitHub's larger runners get cheaper per core, the gap narrows, but Tenki stays cheaper across every tier they offer (up to 64 cores on the Team plan).

Monthly cost at 10,000 build minutes (2-core Linux x64):

  GitHub:  10,000 × $0.006  = $60/month
  Tenki:   10,000 × $0.004  = $40/month
  Savings: $20/month ($240/year)

Monthly cost at 50,000 build minutes (4-core Linux x64):

  GitHub:  50,000 × $0.012  = $600/month
  Tenki:   50,000 × $0.008  = $400/month
  Savings: $200/month ($2,400/year)

For a team burning 50,000 four-core minutes a month, that's $2,400/year back in the budget. Not life-changing for a large org, but that's also before you factor in the code review layer that comes with Tenki (more on that below).

Hardware: Bare Metal vs. Shared Cloud VMs

GitHub's standard runners are Azure VMs. The 2-core Linux runner uses a Standard_DS2_v2 class machine: 2 vCPUs, 7 GB RAM, premium SSD storage. Performance is consistent but not exceptional. You're on shared infrastructure, which means noisy-neighbor effects are real, especially for I/O-heavy jobs like Docker builds or large compilation tasks.

Tenki runs on bare metal servers they own and operate. Their runners use ephemeral VMs on dedicated hardware, which eliminates the noisy-neighbor problem. Tenki claims 30% faster builds on average and shows real benchmarks to back it: their runners product page lists head-to-head comparisons against GitHub-hosted runners on public repos like Citrea (67% faster) and n8n (48% faster).

Faster builds compound the cost savings. If a job that takes 37 minutes on GitHub finishes in 12 minutes on Tenki (as the Citrea benchmark shows), you're paying a lower per-minute rate for fewer minutes. In that specific case, Tenki's cost was $0.098 vs. GitHub's $0.222.

GitHub's larger runners (4-core through 64-core) do use more modern hardware and get better I/O performance, but they still run on Azure's shared infrastructure, and they're only available on GitHub Team or Enterprise Cloud plans.

ARM64 Availability

GitHub offers ARM64 runners across several tiers, starting at $0.005/min for a 2-core Linux arm64 runner and scaling up to $0.098/min for a 64-core machine. These are available on Team and Enterprise Cloud plans. Windows arm64 runners are also available, starting at $0.008/min for 2 cores.

Tenki's current runner lineup supports x64 and macOS environments. ARM64 Linux runners aren't listed on their pricing page as of June 2026. If your CI workload requires native ARM64 builds (common for teams targeting Apple Silicon, AWS Graviton, or embedded ARM platforms), GitHub has the edge here today.

That said, many teams that need ARM64 builds use Docker's buildx with QEMU emulation on x64 runners anyway. It's slower than native ARM, but it works and is already part of most multi-arch Docker workflows. If that's your situation, Tenki's x64 runners handle it fine.

macOS Runners: GitHub's Price Advantage

macOS pricing is where GitHub actually leads. GitHub charges $0.062/min for its standard 3-core or 4-core macOS runner (M1 or Intel). For the 12-core larger runner, it's $0.077/min.

Tenki charges $0.080 per core per minute for macOS runners. For a 3-core equivalent, that works out to $0.24/min, roughly 4x GitHub's rate. macOS hardware is expensive everywhere (Apple's licensing terms make sure of that), and Tenki's per-core pricing model doesn't absorb that cost the way GitHub's flat per-runner rate does.

If your CI is mostly iOS or macOS-native builds, GitHub-hosted runners are the cheaper option. If your macOS usage is minimal and most of your build minutes are Linux x64, Tenki's overall cost will likely still be lower.

What GitHub Runners Don't Include

GitHub-hosted runners are compute. That's it. They run your jobs, bill you per minute, and hand back the results. There's no code review layer, no PR-level quality gate, nothing that inspects the code your workflows produce.

GitHub does offer Copilot code review as a separate product, but it consumes GitHub Actions minutes on private repos (on top of the Copilot subscription), and it's a standalone configuration you set up and manage independently. It doesn't come bundled with your runner minutes.

For teams with AI agents writing code and opening PRs at volume, this creates a gap. Your CI pipeline can confirm that tests pass and linting is clean, but nobody's reviewing the actual code changes before merge unless you've bolted on a third-party review tool, paid for it separately, and configured enforcement rules.

Common third-party review tools like CodeRabbit, Greptile, and Graphite all charge per-seat or per-repo fees on top of your runner costs. That overhead scales linearly as your team grows.

What Tenki Includes at the Same Price Point

Tenki's platform ships three products under one account: runners, a code reviewer, and sandboxes. You can use them together or independently, but the pricing model means teams running CI on Tenki can add AI code review without a separate vendor, separate billing, or separate per-seat subscription.

The Tenki Code Reviewer costs $1 per review. No per-seat fees. That matters when your AI agents are opening 50 PRs a day, because the review cost is tied to PR volume, not team headcount. You don't pay more when a new engineer joins.

The reviewer's benchmark numbers are strong. On a suite of 122 real production bugs, Tenki caught 68.9% of them (84 out of 122), compared to 28.7% for CodeRabbit, 24.6% for Copilot, and 36.1% for Greptile. The full methodology is published on Tenki's benchmark report.

The practical effect: your CI runs and your code review happen on the same platform, under one bill. When an agent opens a PR, the reviewer runs automatically. There's no separate GitHub App to install, no per-seat pricing model to negotiate, no configuration drift between your CI and your review tooling.

Free Tiers and Included Minutes

GitHub includes free minutes for private repos depending on your plan: 2,000/month on Free, 3,000/month on Pro and Team, and 50,000/month on Enterprise Cloud. Public repos get unlimited free minutes on standard runners. Larger runners are always paid, even on public repos.

Tenki's Starter plan is free and includes $10 in monthly credits (covering roughly 5,000 minutes at the 2-core x64 rate). The Team plan costs $200/month and includes $100 in monthly credits, plus access to runners up to 64 cores and 256 GB RAM, 50 concurrent jobs, and 50 Code Reviewer seats.

For a solo developer or small team, GitHub's free tier is hard to beat. You'd need to exceed 2,000 minutes on a private repo before Tenki's pricing advantage kicks in. For teams already paying for GitHub Team or Enterprise, though, the math changes fast.

Migration: One YAML Change

Switching from GitHub-hosted runners to Tenki doesn't require rewriting workflows. You change the runs-on label in your workflow YAML to point at Tenki's runner labels, and everything else stays the same. Steps, actions, caching, artifacts, secrets, environment variables. It all works because Tenki runners are GitHub Actions runners, they just execute on Tenki's infrastructure instead of Azure.

# Before (GitHub-hosted)
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

# After (Tenki)
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: tenki-ubuntu-latest-2

Tenki also offers an automated migration tool that can open a PR with the label changes across your repos. Multiple users in their testimonials mention the migration taking under two minutes.

Who Should Use Which

Stick with GitHub-hosted runners if your usage fits within the free tier, your builds are primarily macOS-native, you depend on ARM64 larger runners, or you're on GitHub Enterprise Cloud and already using the 50,000 included minutes effectively.

Consider Tenki if the bulk of your CI minutes are Linux x64, you want faster builds on bare metal without managing your own infrastructure, you need AI code review at the PR boundary and don't want to manage a separate tool and billing relationship, or you're running AI agents that open high volumes of PRs and want review costs tied to PR count rather than seat count.

The two aren't mutually exclusive either. Some teams run their Linux CI on Tenki for the cost savings and keep their macOS jobs on GitHub-hosted runners. The runs-on label is per-job, so you can split by job type within the same workflow.

Pricing figures in this article were verified against public pricing pages in June 2026. Both GitHub and Tenki adjust rates periodically. Check their respective pricing pages before making purchasing decisions.