Compare
Play Compute, GitHub-hosted runners and Blacksmith
The same workflows run on all three. The differences are how a job is billed, what you can see, and how your agent gets in. 4 rows here are things only Play Compute does.
| Play Compute | GitHub-hosted | Blacksmith | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Billing | |||
| How a job is billed | per second, used memory | per minute, rounded-mark up | per minute |
| 2 vCPU Linux | $0.00134 a minute at typical memory use | $0.0060 a minute | $0.0040 a minute |
| Memory billed on what the job used | |||
| Free every month | $3.00 of usage | 3,000 minutes (Team plan) | 3,000 minutes |
| Spend limit that pauses new jobs | budgets | not documented | |
| Machines | |||
| Memory grows and shrinks under the job | not documented | ||
| Linux arm64 | |||
| macOS and Windows | not documented | ||
| Static egress IP | $40.00 a month | larger runners | $100.00 a month |
| Visibility | |||
| Run history and live logs | |||
| Search logs across runs | |||
| CPU, memory, disk and network per job | on step bands | ||
| Test analytics and flaky tests | |||
| CI analytics: duration, queue, cost | organisation metrics | ||
| Right-size hints from measured use | not documented | ||
| Shell into a running job | third-party action | ||
| Actions services | |||
| actions/cache | in the job's region, 25 GB free | 10 GB a repository | colocated, 25 GB a repository a week |
| Artifacts v4 | in the job's region | GitHub's storage | |
| Docker layer cache | $0.200 per GB a month | $0.500 per GB a month | |
| Sticky disks | $0.200 per GB a month | $0.500 per GB a month | |
| OIDC, attestations, summaries, annotations | |||
| Agents and API | |||
| Connect an agent with one command | signed in for the time you pick | ||
| CLI | playc | gh | |
| Public REST API for everything the app shows | |||
| Migration pull request opened for you | not needed | ||
Other vendors' columns were read from their public pages and docs on 2026-11-10. "Not documented" means we could not find it, not that it is missing.
GitHub-hosted: Placeholder rates, not checked against GitHub's price list yet. Source: https://docs.github.com/en/billing/reference/actions-runner-pricing
Blacksmith: 2 vCPU rate, free minutes and add-ons read from its pricing page on 2026-11-10; larger sizes scaled by vCPU. Source: https://www.blacksmith.sh/pricing