spent last 18 months maintaining a Jenkins setup for a rust CLI tool. 2GB of heap, yaml plugin soup, agents constantly dying. switched to GitHub Actions last quarter and haven't looked back.

the difference is insane. Actions yml is actually readable. no plugin sprawl. secrets work without theater. deployment to S3 and docker registry just works. our pipelines went from 200 lines of jenkins xml to 40 lines of yaml. build times slightly faster too since github's runners are solid.

only tradeoff: if you need complex matrix builds or orchestrating multiple repos, Jenkins wins. but for straightforward rust binaries, tests, and publish. Actions crushes it.

- name: release
  if: startsWith(github.ref, 'refs/tags/')
  run: |
    cargo build --release
    aws s3 cp target/release/mytool s3://bucket/mytool-${{ github.ref_name }}

that's it. no fiddling with credentials in UI, no restarting daemon processes at 2am.