Benchmarks
Benchmark results and methodology comparing Tenki runners against GitHub-hosted runners across real open-source build workloads.
Tenki runners run on modern bare-metal hardware, so the same workflows finish faster than on the older VM instances GitHub Actions uses. Because the per-minute rate is lower too, moving to a larger runner often speeds up a build while still costing less. The numbers below compare identical workflows on Tenki and GitHub-hosted runners.
How we benchmarked
- Tenki runner:
tenki-standard-medium-4c-8g(4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, bare-metal x64 Linux, one ephemeral microVM per job). - GitHub baseline:
ubuntu-latest(2 vCPU, 7 GB RAM, GitHub-hosted Linux). - Workflow parity: identical YAML on both sides, with only the
runs-onvalue changed. No caching plugins, prebuilt images, or custom action substitutions. - Cache state: warm. Each workload ran three consecutive times per runner, and the third run is reported.
- Sample size: 3 runs per workload per runner. The numbers below are the median of the warm-cache runs.
- Workloads: real, reproducible builds from public open-source projects (Rust, Docker, Node.js, Go, Android, n8n).
- Date range: April 2026, re-run quarterly.
Results vs GitHub-hosted runners
| Workload | GitHub-hosted | Tenki | Delta |
|---|---|---|---|
Rust cargo build | 5s | 3s | 40% faster |
| Docker build | 27s | 19s | 30% faster |
Node.js npm install | 10s | 8s | 20% faster |
| Go build | 11s | 0.1s | 99% faster |
Android assembleDebug | 1m 38s | 1m 2s | 37% faster |
| n8n monorepo (full CI) | 55m 58s | 29m 15s | 48% faster |
Raw logs and workflow files are open source. For a specific workload reproduction, write to hello@tenki.cloud.
Cost
On common CI workloads Tenki runs the same jobs up to 60% cheaper than GitHub-hosted runners, billed per minute with no startup surcharge. See the pricing page for the full rate card across vCPU, memory, and macOS profiles.