$ ~/cicdcalculator

TeamCity pricing in 2026
./teamcity --professional --enterprise --cloud

TeamCity is JetBrains's CI/CD platform and the default CI choice for many JVM-heavy organisations. The pricing model is unusual for modern CI: TeamCity Professional is free with a generous-for-small-teams 3 build agents and 100 build configurations, and Enterprise pricing is a one-time-per-year licence fee rather than a per-user subscription. TeamCity Cloud (SaaS) is more conventional, billed per active user with included build credits. This page works through what each option costs in 2026 and where TeamCity fits in the CI/CD landscape.

Pricing here is sourced from the public TeamCity buy page, verified May 2026.

The three flavours of TeamCity

EditionCostBuild agentsBuild configs
Professional$03 included100 max
Server (Enterprise)$1,999 / yr base3 included, +$299/agent/yrUnlimited
Cloud (SaaS)$45 / user / moHosted by JetBrainsUnlimited

# Server edition users get unlimited users at no per-seat cost; only build agents and the base server licence cost money.

What the free Professional tier actually covers

TeamCity Professional is free for any usage, commercial or otherwise. The limits are 3 build agents (so 3 concurrent jobs) and 100 build configurations (so 100 distinct pipelines). For a small team that means roughly 30-60 builds per day comfortably, depending on average build duration. The build-config limit catches larger teams faster than the agent limit: each branch-aware pipeline tends to count as a config, so a team with 25 microservices and a release pipeline per service hits the 100 cap quickly.

Beyond the limits, you upgrade to Server (also called Enterprise in some JetBrains documents). The Server upgrade removes the configuration limit and adds priority support, custom plugins and additional plugins-marketplace access. The base Server licence is $1,999 per year for the unlimited-configurations server, plus $299 per additional build agent per year. The cumulative price is much lower than per-user SaaS at scale: a JVM shop running 10 build agents pays $1,999 + 7 x $299 = $4,092 annually total, regardless of seat count.

Open-source projects get free Server licences via JetBrains's open-source programme. The application process is straightforward and the licence is comparable to JetBrains's IDE OSS programme.

TeamCity Cloud, in detail

TeamCity Cloud is the SaaS variant, hosted by JetBrains. Pricing starts at $45 per active user per month and includes 24,000 build credits per user. A build credit is roughly equivalent to one minute on a standard Linux runner. The credit model is similar to CircleCI's approach: bigger machines (4-core, 8-core) consume more credits per minute, smaller machines fewer. Unused credits roll over for two months.

For a 10-developer JVM team that runs 100 builds per day at 8 minutes each, monthly usage is 800 daily minutes times 21 working days = 16,800 minutes. That fits comfortably inside the 240,000 included credits (10 users x 24,000) at the standard machine size. Total monthly cost = 10 x $45 = $450. Compared to GitHub Actions Team for the same workload, TeamCity Cloud is roughly competitive at this scale and meaningfully cheaper at higher scale because the per-user credit allowance is generous.

Cloud handles the operational responsibility for the server and the build agents. You write pipelines (in YAML or in the Kotlin DSL that TeamCity has historically championed) and TeamCity executes them. The trade-off vs Server is the per-user pricing model; for teams above 20 users, the annual cost on Server with 8 agents is often less than the same team on Cloud with 24-month-rolling credits.

JVM-shop economics

TeamCity is over-represented in JVM shops for two reasons. First, JetBrains is the dominant JVM tooling vendor and the IntelliJ-TeamCity integration is genuinely tight: build configurations can be opened directly in IntelliJ, pipeline-level annotations show up in the IDE, and the developer workflow feels uniform across IDE and CI. Second, TeamCity's first-class support for Gradle and Maven, including detailed dependency analysis and parallel build distribution, is a noticeable productivity benefit for Gradle-heavy codebases.

For a 50-developer Java or Kotlin shop already paying for IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate licences, the marginal cost of TeamCity Server is small compared to the integration benefit. The same shop trying to adopt GitHub Actions or GitLab CI runs into Gradle cache warmth issues and slower JVM warmup penalties because the platforms are designed around stateless ephemeral runners rather than the persistent agent model TeamCity uses by default.

Outside JVM, the case for TeamCity is weaker. It supports Node, Python, Go and .NET adequately but the ecosystem advantage that matters in JVM (deep Gradle integration, JetBrains tooling parity) does not transfer. A Node-only team picking CI/CD on greenfield in 2026 would land on GitHub Actions or GitLab CI almost always; the JetBrains gravity that pulls JVM shops to TeamCity is absent.

Operational footprint

A self-hosted TeamCity Server runs comfortably on a single VM with 4 GB of RAM for the server, plus separate agents for the build workload. The agents can be VMs or Kubernetes pods using JetBrains's official agent Docker images. Most production deployments use a Postgres backend (the default in-memory HSQL is fine for evaluation but not production), which adds the cost of a small RDS or self-hosted Postgres instance.

Operator overhead lands at 2-6 hours per month for a typical mid-size deployment: occasional plugin upgrades, agent scaling adjustments, database vacuum operations, and the every-six-months major-version upgrade. The upgrades are largely undramatic; JetBrains is conservative with breaking changes and most version-to-version upgrades work without configuration changes.

Related deep dives

Frequently Asked Questions

# click any question to expand

Is TeamCity free?>
Yes, in a limited form. TeamCity Professional is the free tier and includes 3 build agents, 100 build configurations, and unlimited users. It is sufficient for small JVM teams or any team where 3 concurrent jobs is enough throughput. Beyond those limits you pay for additional build agents and a Server upgrade. The licence is freely usable in commercial settings, not just open-source.
What does TeamCity Enterprise cost?>
Server upgrade to remove the build-configuration limit (allow unlimited configs) starts at $1,999 per year. Each additional build agent above the included three costs $299 per year. A typical mid-size JVM team running 8 build agents on Server pays $1,999 + 5 x $299 = $3,494 per year. The pricing is one-time-per-year for perpetual access, not subscription-bundled-with-support, which is unusual in current CI/CD pricing.
What is TeamCity Cloud?>
TeamCity Cloud is the JetBrains-hosted SaaS offering, billed monthly per active user with included build credits. Pricing in 2026 starts at $45 per user per month with 24,000 build credits per user included. Additional credits cost $0.01 each. The Cloud product covers the same feature set as Server with reduced operational responsibility, traded for the per-user pricing model.
How does TeamCity compare to Jenkins?>
TeamCity has a polished UI, first-class JVM build tools (Gradle, Maven, Ant), and excellent build pipeline visualisation. Jenkins is more flexible and has a wider plugin ecosystem. TeamCity Professional is free up to 3 agents and 100 configs, which is enough for most small teams. Jenkins is always free in software cost but has higher operator overhead. For JVM-heavy shops, TeamCity is often cheaper to operate at small to mid scale because the operator hours are lower.
Is TeamCity still being actively developed?>
Yes. JetBrains releases TeamCity multiple times per year and maintains feature parity between Server and Cloud editions. The 2026 release line continues to add features around build observability, supply-chain security and Kotlin DSL improvements. It is not the fastest-moving CI/CD platform but it is well-funded and not at risk of stagnation.
Does TeamCity work for non-JVM languages?>
Yes, but it is over-indexed in JVM shops because JetBrains is the dominant JVM tooling vendor (IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, GoLand, Rider). TeamCity supports Node, Python, Go, .NET, Ruby and any other build chain you can run as a build step. The non-JVM experience is competent but not differentiating; you would pick TeamCity for a Node team if your shop already runs JetBrains products, not as a top-down choice on its own merits.
Can I run TeamCity in a container?>
Yes. JetBrains publishes official Docker images for the TeamCity server and build agents. Most production deployments run the server in a container behind a reverse proxy with the database in a separate Postgres instance, and run build agents either as VMs or as Kubernetes pods using the official agent images. The container-first deployment model is well-supported and a common production pattern.