SuperCI vs RunsOn: runners in your own cloud
Both start a fresh machine in your own AWS account for each job. SuperCI is open source and also runs GitLab CI, Cloudflare and Modal; RunsOn has been at it longer and does more on AWS.
SuperCI and RunsOn do the same job on AWS: when a GitHub Actions job is queued, they start a machine for it in your own account, on spot capacity where they can, and end it when the job is done. You pay AWS’s price for the machine.
Side by side
| What | SuperCI | RunsOn |
|---|---|---|
| Jobs run in | Your AWS, Cloudflare or Modal account | Your AWS account |
| Works with | GitHub Actions and GitLab CI | GitHub Actions |
| Licence | MIT, open source | Commercial; the CloudFormation templates are MIT |
| You pay | Your cloud’s price | AWS’s price, and from €300 a year for commercial use |
| Set up | A dashboard on your computer, or commands | A CloudFormation stack, in about ten minutes |
| Between jobs | A small function waits; nothing else runs | A control plane on ECS Fargate stays up |
| Longest job | Six hours, or what you set, up to 5 days on AWS | Twelve hours, or what you set |
| Windows, arm64, GPUs | Yes, on AWS | Yes |
| macOS | No | No |
RunsOn is free for nonprofit, open-source, educational and personal non-commercial use.
Where SuperCI differs
It is open source. All of SuperCI is under the MIT licence: the dashboard, the control plane and what runs on the machines. RunsOn’s server and agent are commercially licensed, and their source comes with its Enterprise licence.
It is not only AWS. SuperCI also runs jobs in Cloudflare containers and Modal sandboxes, and you put the providers in order: a job goes to the first that can run its machine and has room. A job with no spot machine can go to Cloudflare before it goes to an on-demand machine.
It runs GitLab CI. The same providers, order and limits serve GitLab jobs, from GitLab.com or a GitLab you host.
Limits you set. Each provider has a monthly budget and a number of jobs at once. At either, jobs go to the next provider.
Where RunsOn is ahead
It has run far more jobs. RunsOn says it runs more than three million jobs a day for 900 companies. SuperCI is new.
It does more on AWS. RunsOn has an S3 cache it measures as about twice as fast to restore, and pools of warm machines that start a job in under six seconds. SuperCI starts each machine when its job arrives and has neither.
A longer job by default. A RunsOn machine runs for twelve hours unless you set otherwise; SuperCI’s for six.
One more thing to know: on AWS, SuperCI’s machines start from the machine images RunsOn publishes, which carry the tools of GitHub’s own runners.
Which to pick
Pick RunsOn if all your jobs are GitHub Actions on AWS, you want the most proven tool there, and a licence fee is no obstacle. Pick SuperCI if you want open source with nothing to buy, GitLab CI, or somewhere to run jobs besides AWS.
Sources
Read on 9 October 2026.
- RunsOn: where jobs run, what it works with, its figures for jobs a day, the cache and warm pools, no macOS.
- RunsOn pricing: the licences and who may use it free.
- runs-on/runs-on on GitHub: what is under the MIT licence and what is commercially licensed.
- RunsOn’s install guide: the CloudFormation stack and how long it takes.
- RunsOn’s stack parameters: the control plane on ECS Fargate, and a runner’s longest run.