Who is Earthly best for?

Earthly is built for Platform engineering and DevEx teams managing standards across large, diverse engineering organizations, Security and compliance teams needing automated SDLC policy enforcement and audit evidence, Engineering leaders at mid-to-large enterprises governing AI-generated code quality, DevOps engineers seeking reproducible, portable builds across heterogeneous CI/CD environments (legacy Earthfiles users). Common use cases include Enforcing engineering standards consistently across heterogeneous multi-team, multi-language organizations; Governing AI-generated code quality and compliance in agentic development workflows; Automating post-mortem action item enforcement org-wide without per-repo manual rollout.

How is Earthly priced?

No public pricing page is available for Earthly Lunar as of April 2026. The site directs visitors to a demo booking flow or a self-service 'Automate Now' onboarding path, indicating a sales-assisted or freemium-to-enterprise model. Legacy Earthfiles Satellites pricing was usage-based (per active user per month) across BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud, AWS-based) and Self-Hosted deployment options; those commercial tiers were discontinued effective July 2025. The open-source Earthfiles build framework remains available free of charge under the Mozilla Public License v2.0.

What are the alternatives to Earthly?

Common CI/CD & Build Systems alternatives to Earthly include GitLab, GitHub, CircleCI, Buildkite, Depot. See the full comparison hub at /verticals/cicd-build-systems/compare.

What do users praise about Earthly?

Users frequently praise: Familiar Dockerfile/Makefile-like syntax with minimal learning curve; Consistent, reproducible builds across developer machines and CI environments; Automatic build parallelism and layer caching without manual configuration; Excellent monorepo and polyrepo support with cross-repository target references; No per-repo YAML changes needed for SDLC instrumentation (Lunar); Fast guardrail creation from plain-language standards descriptions (Lunar).

What are common complaints about Earthly?

Frequently cited limitations: Active maintenance of Earthfiles discontinued April 2025; commercial services shut down July 2025; Failed to commercialize Earthfiles against free DIY and open-source alternatives; No public pricing for Lunar; demo-gated sales process; Very limited public customer evidence or case studies for Lunar; Small team size raises enterprise support concerns; Lunar is early-stage with no independent review scores.

When was Earthly founded and where?

Earthly was founded in 2020, headquartered in San Francisco, CA by Vlad A. Ionescu.

Earthly reports 11-50 employees.

AI visibility report

AI visibility report for Earthly in CI/CD & Build Systems.

Outside the top three on 23 of the 25 prompts buyers actually ask.

GitHub is cited on 18 of those losses.

25 prompts

6 platforms

Updated Sep 26, 2026 - refreshed weekly

Track Earthly daily

14-day free trial. No card required. Setup comes pre-filled for Earthly.

Track Earthly across these prompts daily.

Start your 14-day trial

1percent

Presence Rate

Low presence

Still absent from 99.3% of tracked prompt responses

Top-3 citations across 150 prompt × platform pairs

No clearrank

Peer Ranking

#1#16

No clear rankin CI/CD & Build Systems

Key Metrics

Presence Rate

0.7%

Share of Voice

0.5%

Avg Position

#2.0

Docs Presence

0.0%

Blog Presence

0.7%

Brand Mentions

0.0%

Platform Breakdown

ChatGPT

4%1/25 prompts

Gemini Search

Research dossierCapabilities, use cases, sources, reviews, pricing, and FAQ

Overview

Earthly Technologies, founded in 2020 in San Francisco by Vlad A. Ionescu (ex-Google, ex-VMware), initially built Earthfiles—an open-source, container-based CI/CD build framework combining Dockerfile and Makefile paradigms for reproducible, portable builds with automatic parallelism and layer caching. Earthfiles attracted 12,000+ GitHub stars and production adoption at NVIDIA, Intel, Zapier, and Databricks. After failing to commercialize its Satellite remote build runner service against free alternatives, the company announced in April 2025 it was ending active Earthfiles maintenance and shutting down all commercial cloud services. Earthly has since pivoted to Earthly Lunar, a platform engineering governance product launched in 2026 that enforces engineering standards across the SDLC—from AI agent authoring loops to PR checks and deploy gates—without requiring CI/CD pipeline rewrites.

AI visibility report

AI visibility report for Earthly in CI/CD & Build Systems.

Outside the top three on 23 of the 25 prompts buyers actually ask.

GitHub is cited on 18 of those losses.

25 prompts

6 platforms

Updated Sep 26, 2026 - refreshed weekly

Track Earthly daily

14-day free trial. No card required. Setup comes pre-filled for Earthly.

Track Earthly across these prompts daily.

Start your 14-day trial

1percent

Presence Rate

Low presence

Still absent from 99.3% of tracked prompt responses

Top-3 citations across 150 prompt × platform pairs

No clearrank

Peer Ranking

#1#16

No clear rankin CI/CD & Build Systems

Key Metrics

Presence Rate

0.7%

Share of Voice

0.5%

Avg Position

#2.0

Docs Presence

0.0%

Blog Presence

0.7%

Brand Mentions

0.0%

Platform Breakdown

ChatGPT

4%1/25 prompts

Gemini Search

Research dossierCapabilities, use cases, sources, reviews, pricing, and FAQ

Overview

Reviews

Praised

Familiar Dockerfile/Makefile-like syntax with minimal learning curve
Consistent, reproducible builds across developer machines and CI environments
Automatic build parallelism and layer caching without manual configuration
Excellent monorepo and polyrepo support with cross-repository target references
No per-repo YAML changes needed for SDLC instrumentation (Lunar)
Fast guardrail creation from plain-language standards descriptions (Lunar)

Criticized

Active maintenance of Earthfiles discontinued April 2025; commercial services shut down July 2025
Failed to commercialize Earthfiles against free DIY and open-source alternatives
No public pricing for Lunar; demo-gated sales process
Very limited public customer evidence or case studies for Lunar
Small team size raises enterprise support concerns
Lunar is early-stage with no independent review scores

No verified scores exist on G2 or Gartner Peer Insights for either Earthfiles or Earthly Lunar as of April 2026. Product Hunt shows 6 community reviews for the legacy Earthfiles product, with users praising its cross-environment build consistency and familiar syntax, particularly for use cases like consistent protobuf generation across developer machines. Lunar launched in 2026 and has no established review corpus. Anonymous testimonials on earthly.dev from platform engineering leaders at unnamed cloud infrastructure and communications companies highlight Lunar's data collection efficiency and the speed of guardrail creation relative to building in-house.

Prompt	ChatGPT	Gemini Search	Bing Copilot	Perplexity	Google AI Mode	Grok
Capability0/5 cited (0%)
Which CI/CD platforms have the best native support for running iOS and Android mobile builds without needing self-hosted runners?	A competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	A competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited

#	Brand	PresencePres.	Share of VoiceSoV	DocsDocs	BlogBlog	MentionsMent.	Avg PosPos
1	GitLab	20.0%	20.8%	18.7%	2.0%	66.0%	#3.7
2	GitHub	19.3%	22.2%	18.0%	2.0%	70.7%	#3.2
3	CircleCI	17.3%	16.3%	10.7%	2.7%	44.0%	#4.1
4	Buildkite	14.7%	17.2%	13.3%	0.0%	26.7%	#3.9
5	Depot	6.7%	4.5%	0.0%	0.0%	4.7%	#2.9
6	Nx	4.7%	3.2%	4.0%	0.0%	12.7%	#1.6
7	Semaphore	4.7%	5.9%	0.7%	4.0%	6.0%	#4.6
8	Harness	3.3%	3.6%	0.0%	2.0%	10.0%	#4.1
9	Dagger	2.0%	1.4%	2.0%	0.0%	6.0%	#1.7
10	Turborepo	2.0%	1.8%	1.3%	0.0%	11.3%	#2.5
11	TeamCity	2.0%	1.4%	0.0%	1.3%	0.0%	#4.3
12	Azure Pipelines	1.3%	0.9%	1.3%	0.0%	0.0%	#7.5
13	Earthly	0.7%	0.5%	0.0%	0.7%	0.0%	#2.0
14	Jenkins	0.7%	0.5%	0.7%	0.0%	31.3%	#4.0
15	CloudBees	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	—
16	Travis CI	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	2.7%	—

Developer Experience1/5 cited (20%)
What CI platforms give engineering teams the best tools for debugging flaky tests and intermittent pipeline failures in a cloud environment?	A competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	A competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited

Integrations & Ecosystem0/5 cited (0%)
Which CI providers make pipeline migration easiest — are there any portable pipeline standards that reduce lock-in when switching?	A competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	A competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited

Performance & Reliability0/5 cited (0%)
What tools or approaches let you benchmark build execution speed across different CI platforms for the same test suite?	A competitor was cited	A competitor was cited	A competitor was cited	A competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited

AI visibility report for Earthly in CI/CD & Build Systems.

Key Metrics

Platform Breakdown

Overview

AI visibility report for Earthly in CI/CD & Build Systems.

Key Metrics

Platform Breakdown

Overview

Prompts where competitors are visible and Earthly is not.

Where Earthly is winning1

Where Earthly is losing5

Key Facts

Key Capabilities8

Key Use Cases7

Recent Trend

How AI describes Earthly3

Most cited sources1

Alternatives in CI/CD & Build Systems6

Reviews

Pricing

Limitations

Topic Coverage

Prompt-Level Results

Vertical Ranking

Turn this into your team dashboard

Frequently asked questions

Setup & First Run0/5 cited (0%)
What's the fastest CI/CD platform to set up for a monorepo with 15 microservices?	A competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	A competitor was cited	A competitor was cited	A competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited

AI visibility report for Earthly in CI/CD & Build Systems.

Key Metrics

Platform Breakdown

Overview

AI visibility report for Earthly in CI/CD & Build Systems.

Key Metrics

Platform Breakdown

Overview

Prompts where competitors are visible and Earthly is not.

Where Earthly is winning1

Where Earthly is losing5

Key Facts

Key Capabilities8

Key Use Cases7

Recent Trend

How AI describes Earthly3

Most cited sources1

Alternatives in CI/CD & Build Systems6

Reviews

Pricing

Limitations

Topic Coverage

Prompt-Level Results

Vertical Ranking

Turn this into your team dashboard

Frequently asked questions

What does Earthly do?

Who is Earthly best for?

How is Earthly priced?

What are the alternatives to Earthly?

What do users praise about Earthly?

What are common complaints about Earthly?

When was Earthly founded and where?

How big is Earthly?