A Comparative Study on the Performance of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) Tools in DevSecOps Process for Mobile Application Development in Small Organizations

Abstract

This study compares the performance of three Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) tools—Jenkins, GitHub Actions, and GitLab CI/CD—within a DevSecOps pipeline for mobile application development in the context of small organizations. Most prior research has focused on general or web-based software, so the mobile pipeline remains under-studied. The authors designed a five-stage DevSecOps pipeline and built two prototype applications with the Flutter framework: a small Task Management application and a medium-sized Home Repair and Maintenance Services application. Each tool ran the complete pipeline 20 times for each application size, which gives six experimental conditions and a total sample of 120 pipeline runs (n = 3 tools × 2 application sizes × 20 runs per condition = 120). Pipeline duration and system resource usage (CPU and memory) were measured automatically. Jenkins delivered the fastest pipeline (median 127 s for the small app and 156 s for the medium app), GitLab CI/CD ranked second and was the most consistent tool, and GitHub Actions had the longest and most variable execution time. CPU usage did not differ significantly across tools, but Jenkins consumed the most memory and GitHub Actions the least. The findings reveal a clear trade-off between speed and resource use, and provide practical guidance: Jenkins for speed-driven teams, GitHub Actions for teams with limited staff and infrastructure, and GitLab CI/CD for teams that need predictable delivery.