Vendor Lock-In vs. Strategic Partnership for Your CI/CD

Dmitrii Korovin

This article was brought to you by Jakkie Koekemoer & Shweta, draft.dev.

Traditional wisdom in the dev world is that once you opt for proprietary APIs or vendor-specific tooling, migrating to alternative platforms is costly or impractical to adopt in the future.

That’s why engineering teams have considered vendor lock-in a trap. You end up paying more, limiting technical flexibility, losing bargaining power, and cramming your processes into someone else’s roadmap. And if you still want control and flexibility, you need to be on your toes with proactive planning, regular exports, and negotiating strict contractual exit terms.

But this binary thinking of lock-in vs. freedom is misleading.

Whenever you spend significant time investing in any technology or architecture, you’re locked in. It might not seem like it on paper, but your reliance on that system grows the more you use it. Switching to something else requires a significant amount of work, even if there aren’t any other costs involved.

Instead of trying to escape the unavoidable, consider to what extent any tool or technology meets your needs without enforcing limitations that hold you back.

In the context of CI/CD, that means a tool that accelerates delivery without sacrificing control.

Your dependencies in CI/CD run across integrations, pricing tiers, hosted vs. self-hosted trade-offs, supported SLAs, and ecosystem workflows. A CI/CD vendor that provides open APIs, clear export paths, predictable pricing, and collaborative roadmapping has the potential to become a strategic partner.

This guide highlights the potential technical, financial, operational, and strategic risks CI/CD solutions can pose for your organization. Based on this framework, we’ll walk you through a practical questionnaire for evaluating potential solutions against your organization’s needs.

Understanding your organization’s risk profile

Any CI/CD platform can present you with a list of features, and that’s enough if you only want to choose a product.

However, if you want to make a long-term commitment, you need to stop asking “What features does this solution have?” and instead ask “What risks does this vendor introduce?” By considering risks, you can assess whether a vendor will be a good strategic partner for you in the long term.

Let’s look at the most important risks a CI/CD platform can introduce for an organization.

Technical risks

The foundation of any CI/CD platform is its portability. Consider whether the platform locks you into proprietary languages or relies on custom plugins for critical integrations.

More importantly, can pipelines, configurations, build artifacts, and logs be exported in a reusable format? If not, you run the risk of significant rework whenever there’s a need to reproduce builds in a different environment, be it a new data center, cloud region, or entirely different infrastructure provider.

Reproducing the same build reliability elsewhere requires substantial rewrites or custom tooling, potentially turning what should be a straightforward migration into a months-long engineering effort.

Financial risks

Hidden costs can accumulate quickly if you’re not careful. Consider data-transfer fees that you pay every time your team downloads a large build artifact, storage overages, and unpredictable API pricing when you’re building the financial case for adoption.

Also consider what happens when it’s time to leave. Do contracts lock in long-term minimums? Are there punitive exit clauses? A single large migration with consulting fees, rework, and downtime costs can make switching prohibitively expensive.

Operational risks

Day-to-day dependence on a vendor creates hidden fragility. If SLAs are slow, outages linger, or documentation falls out of sync with the product, you become increasingly reliant on vendor support just to keep critical systems running.

Over time, you may end up locking into a specific UX and workflow, making it painful to change platforms even when better alternatives emerge.

Strategic risks

A platform that serves your current needs may not support your future growth, so consider alignment. Does the vendor’s product vision match your evolving direction? If the vendor deprioritizes features you rely on, undergoes a strategic shift in pricing or focus, or is acquired by a competitor with different priorities, will you be forced to compromise your own product goals?

Without formal channels to influence the vendor’s roadmap, you’re betting that the vendor’s interests will remain aligned with yours, which is a risky assumption over a multiyear relationship.

Evaluating CI/CD platforms

The ideal CI/CD solution reduces risk, accelerates delivery, and empowers you to evolve your pipelines and processes. Which vendor or solution meets these requirements will depend on your organizational requirements and risk factors.

The following questionnaire can help you with your evaluation.

Use the questions and suggested importance (Must, Should, or Nice) as a starting point, but feel free to adapt the questions and importance based on your organization’s needs.

Complete the questionnaire for each platform or vendor you’re assessing, and rate questions from 0–2:

• 0 = not available/unacceptable gap (indicates a real blocker)
• 1 = partial/mitigatable (the capability exists but has limits or caveats)
• 2 = fully available/meets requirements (the vendor delivers the capability as needed)

Score yourself as follows:

1. Add each vendor’s Must scores (max 11). Multiply the sum by 2 (to factor in its criticality).
2. Add the raw sums for Should (max 8) and Nice (max 6).
3. Total score = (Must sum × 2) + Should sum + Nice sum.
4. Max possible = 36. Convert to a percentage if you want.

Interpret the results as follows:

• >60 percent: Strong candidate (confirm that there are no instances where Must = 0)
• 30–60 percent: Proceed with caution
• <30 percent: High risk, don’t commit

If any Must row is scored 0 for a vendor, it should be treated as a major deal-breaker, and you ought to remove the vendor from the shortlist. If you’re considering any option that scores poorly on export, automation, or billing transparency, running a short portability proof of concept (POC) is recommended.

If you’ve identified any red flags, categorize them to decide on your next steps:

• Blockers: Are there critical gaps that are deal-breakers (for example, no data export or punitive exit clauses)? This should remove the vendor from consideration.
• Major risks: Are there issues that could be a deal-breaker (for example, API limitations)? Do a POC before making a decision.
• Concerns: Are there any concerning issues that aren’t critical (for example, uncertainty about the product roadmap)? Contact the vendor to see if they can shed some light.

Lastly, remember to escalate anything affecting compliance, SLAs, or costs to SRE, procurement, and/or legal teams.

DIY vs. integrated CI/CD platforms: Risks, rewards, and decision criteria

Partnering with a vendor isn’t your only option for a CI/CD solution. You can also build your own.

A do-it-yourself (DIY) CI/CD gives you full control to tailor every component to niche needs and stitch together the best available tools. This can be useful for unique architectures or strict compliance demands.

However, that control comes with costs. You must own maintenance, upgrades, security, and scaling, and the glue code between tools often becomes brittle technical debt.

Choose DIY if you need extreme customization, have seasoned DevOps capacity, and want full control over cost levers.

However, if you value developer productivity, shorter time to market, and vendor-managed reliability, opt for an integrated solution.

Other resources

• Two-thirds of engineers lose 20%+ of their time to inefficiencies. Check out our ROI of Developer Experience blog post to see how TeamCity’s dev-centric CI/CD platform helps reclaim productivity through intuitive UIs, deep VCS integration, and unified monitoring that eliminates context switching.
• Thinking about the practical implications of migration? Our Migration Planning Kit for DevOps engineers and engineering managers includes a migration readiness checklist and a phased rollout plan.

Subscribe to TeamCity Blog updates

Subscribe form

By submitting this form, I agree to the JetBrains Privacy Policy Notification icon

By submitting this form, I agree that JetBrains s.r.o. ("JetBrains") may use my name, email address, and location data to send me newsletters, including commercial communications, and to process my personal data for this purpose. I agree that JetBrains may process said data using third-party services for this purpose in accordance with the JetBrains Privacy Policy. I understand that I can revoke this consent at any time in my profile. In addition, an unsubscribe link is included in each email.

Submit

Thanks, we've got you!