Depot vs Blacksmith: GitHub Actions Runner Comparison

By Daniel Zoghalchali·Latchkey

Two popular managed-runner options with different strengths: Depot for Docker builds, Blacksmith for raw CPU speed.

Depot and Blacksmith both beat GitHub-hosted runners, but they optimize for different things. Here is the honest split - plus where a self-healing option like Latchkey comes in.

	Depot	Blacksmith
Best at	Docker build acceleration + remote cache	High-clock-speed CPU runners
Ideal workload	Container-heavy pipelines	Single-threaded build/test
Self-healing	No	No

Pick Depot if

Your CI is dominated by Docker image builds and remote build caching is your bottleneck.

Pick Blacksmith if

Your build/test time is CPU-bound and faster per-core hardware is the win.

A third option

If your real pain is cost plus flaky re-runs, neither solves that - Latchkey adds self-healing on cheaper managed runners.

The verdict

Docker-bound: Depot. CPU-bound: Blacksmith. Cost + reliability: evaluate Latchkey alongside them.

Switching costs you one line

Latchkey runners are a drop-in replacement: change runs-on: and the rest of the workflow is untouched. Self-healing is on by default, so transient failures are fixed and retried instead of failing the build.

.github/workflows/ci.yml

# before
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

# after
    runs-on: latchkey-medium

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References

GitHub Actions documentation