So if you have ever done anything in DevOps you have worked with some kind of CI/CD. I have worked with multiple different ones over the years and have certainly generated some opinions around them and which ones I prefer.
Ease of Use
GitHub Actions has been one of the easiest to use ones I have encountered. It has provided the most straightforward way to work with things. This has allowed me to quickly create the pipelines that I need to create. The other side of this is that it has allowed more of the Developers that I work with to make edits. It has been a very approachable CI/CD solution.
UI
One of the biggest benefits to me is that it helps to continue to consolidate things down into GitHub. Rather than having to log into a bunch of different systems in order to see anything it allows the Developers to continue to log into one spot and see all of their information. This also allows holding the logs a little more centrally and even allows referencing specific builds more straightforward.
Plugins
There are so many different things on the GitHub Actions marketplace. This really allows for quickly jumping in and adding functionality. There do enter some security concerns here and most of the time they end up having to get approved, but it overall allows everything to operate very cleanly.
Self-Hosted Runners
If there is the concern around security it is possible to self-host the runners. This can be done very quickly and easily with just a GitHub PAT. This really helps to make it easier to just work with things quickly.
Overall
There isn’t some amazing reason to use GitHub actions over Jenkins or something, but to me it is super easy. Plus since even free organizations come with free build minutes it provides a very easy way to just continue to work with everything. Overall it just provides a clean way to work with everything and allow more people to help contribute to systems.