Data as of Oct 7, 2026A topic in Monorepo CI Build Optimization Tools.
Reviewed by Dimitry Apollonsky
Mentioned in · Jul 5 – Oct 7, 2026
ChatGPT SearchOct 7, 2026
If your goal is “make CI substantially faster without rebuilding the whole CI system,” my pick depends on your stack:
| Situation | Best choice | Why |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub Actions, general-purpose | Depot | Faster runners + much faster remote caching, with minimal workflow changes |
| GitHub Actions, modest slowdown |
Google AI ModeSep 27, 2026
What tools can help us optimize our CI pipelines because they are currently running too slowly?
Our CI pipelines are taking too long to run. Can you recommend a tool that offers caching or optimization to speed them up?
| Free/native and often enough if your cache keys are good |
| Bazel / huge monorepo | Bazel remote cache (e.g. BuildBuddy) | Shares build results across machines and CI runs |
| Nx monorepo | Nx Cloud | Remote caching + distributed task execution |
| Turborepo | Turborepo Remote Cache | Very good fit for JS/TS monorepos |
| Buildkite | Buildkite Cache + remote build cache | Native integration and flexible cache strategies |
For a typical GitHub Actions setup, I'd try Depot first. Its GitHub Actions runners are a drop-in replacement, and Depot claims up to 3× faster runners plus 10× faster caching.
A particularly attractive part is that you can often change essentially just:
runs-on: ubuntu-24.04to:
runs-on: depot-ubuntu-24.04while keeping the rest of the workflow intact.
Depot also added automatic caching of GitHub Actions source itself in September 2026, separate from dependency/build-output caches.
If you're currently doing something like:
checkout
↓
install dependencies
↓
compile
↓
testthe biggest gains often come from:
package-lock.json, yarn.lock, poetry.lock, etc.).GitHub's native cache supports dependency and build-output caching and recommends keys based on things such as OS + lockfile hash.
One important caveat: don't blindly cache the entire workspace. GitHub warns that caches can be read by workflows and potentially contain executable content, so secrets should never be cached and cache writes from untrusted workflows need care.
If you give me CI provider + language/build system + approximate current pipeline time, e.g.
GitHub Actions + Node/TypeScript + pnpm + Turborepo, ~15 min PR builds
I can recommend the specific caching/optimization setup I'd use and estimate where the biggest speedup is likely to come from.
There isn't a single "best" tool because the right choice depends on whether your bottleneck is downloading dependencies, building Docker images , or running heavy test suites . Instead of swapping your entire CI platform, the fastest wins usually come from matching the right optimization approach to your specific stack.
Here is a breakdown of the top caching and optimization tools and strategies, categorized by what they fix best:
docker build and pushing layers, Depot provides cloud-accelerated builders with persistent, blazing-fast NVMe layer caching that drops right into GitHub Actions or other CI runners.node_modules, pip, maven, go build ). Before buying a third-party tool, make sure you are properly keying your native cache. For instance, using actions/cache keyed tightly against a hash of your lockfile (package-lock.json, poetry.lock ) avoids re-downloading gigabytes of packages on every run.To help narrow down the best fix, tell me: