RunsOn alternative: fast GitHub Actions runners with no AWS account to run

What is the best RunsOn alternative for GitHub Actions?

Sengi, for teams that want faster runners without running them. RunsOn puts runners in your own AWS account: you deploy a CloudFormation stack, pay a yearly licence from €300, and pay AWS for every instance. Sengi is managed: every job runs on an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D desktop CPU boosting past 5 GHz, on bare metal with local NVMe, in a fresh VM, with 2 vCPU jobs ready in 2 seconds and the cache included. Builds finish up to 1.9× faster than on GitHub’s runners, for up to 74% less per build. One runs-on line, one bill, from $0.003 a minute.

Last checked October 23, 2026, against RunsOn's homepage and pricing page.

How do Sengi and RunsOn compare?

Both keep your CI in GitHub Actions and give each job a fresh machine. The difference is who runs it.

RunsOn figures: RunsOn's homepage and pricing page, checked October 23, 2026.

What does Sengi cost?

Sengi charges per job minute, with boot and teardown never billed: $0.003 for 2 vCPU and 8 GB, $0.006 for 4 vCPU and 16 GB and $0.012 for 8 vCPU and 32 GB. That is up to half GitHub's price per minute, and builds finish up to 1.9× faster, so each build costs up to 74% less than on GitHub. There is no licence, no AWS bill and no control plane. 3,000 minutes are included on Sengi every month.

RunsOn's licence runs €300 a year under 50,000 jobs a month, €900 under 200,000, €1,800 under 500,000 and €3,600 unlimited, before any AWS charges. For the full cost of running runners yourself, including ops time, see what a self-hosted runner really costs. See Sengi runner pricing or the GitHub Actions cost calculator.

How fast is Sengi on RunsOn's own benchmark?

RunsOn publishes an open benchmark harness, and Sengi ran it on October 9, 2026 at 4 vCPU. Against RunsOn's published GitHub results:

Sengi also reads from disk at 15× the random-read speed of GitHub's 4 vCPU runner (296k against 19.6k IOPS). More in faster GitHub Actions runners and the runner comparison.

How do I switch from RunsOn to Sengi?

Replace the RunsOn label with the Sengi label of the same size, and merge.

jobs:
  build:
-   runs-on: runs-on=${{ github.run_id }}/cpu=4
+   runs-on: sengi-standard-4-ubuntu-2404

If a job uses runs-on/action only to route actions/cache to S3, remove that step: on Sengi, actions/cache is served from Sengi's own cache. Or give your coding agent one prompt and it opens the pull request. See how switching works. Your AWS stack can be torn down once the last workflow has moved.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best RunsOn alternative for GitHub Actions runners?

Sengi, if you want fast runners without running them. Every job runs on an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D desktop CPU boosting past 5 GHz, on bare metal with local NVMe, in a fresh VM, and 2 vCPU jobs start on a pre-booted VM in 2 seconds. There is no AWS account to give it, no CloudFormation stack, no yearly licence and no spot capacity to manage: change one runs-on line and pay per minute from $0.003.

How is RunsOn different from Sengi?

RunsOn is software you deploy into your own AWS account: a CloudFormation stack starts an EC2 instance for each job, and you pay RunsOn a yearly licence and AWS for the instances, storage and control plane. Sengi is a managed service: it owns the machines, images, scaling, isolation and cache, and you pay one per-minute price.

How much does RunsOn cost?

RunsOn's licence is €300 a year under 50,000 jobs a month, €900 under 200,000, €1,800 under 500,000 and €3,600 a year unlimited. Compute is billed separately by AWS: EC2 spot or on-demand instances, their EBS volumes and a small control plane that RunsOn puts at about $7 a month. Sengi has no licence and no second bill: $0.003, $0.006 and $0.012 a minute for 2, 4 and 8 vCPU.

Do I need an AWS account for Sengi?

No. Sengi runs the machines. You connect GitHub, change runs-on to a Sengi label such as sengi-standard-4-ubuntu-2404 and merge.

What happens when a spot instance is reclaimed?

On RunsOn, jobs run on EC2 spot by default; a job that loses its spot instance is retried once on an on-demand instance. Sengi does not use spot capacity: every job runs on dedicated bare metal from start to finish.

Are Sengi's speed figures from RunsOn's benchmark?

Yes. Sengi ran RunsOn's open benchmark harness on October 9, 2026 at 4 vCPU and compared it with RunsOn's published GitHub results: a production Docker image built 1.9× faster than on GitHub's runner at 74% less per build, and Rust, TypeScript and Docker builds together ran 1.8× faster at 72% less.