Earthly vs Aleph Alpha

About

Earthly is an open-source build automation framework that runs build steps inside containers, ensuring that builds produce identical results on developer laptops and in CI systems regardless of the underlying environment. Earthly's Earthfile syntax combines familiar concepts from Dockerfile and Makefile, making it approachable to teams already using containers without requiring deep build system expertise. The containerized execution model eliminates the classic "works on my machine" problem by ensuring every dependency is pinned and every environment is identical. Earthly supports parallel execution of independent build targets and efficient layer caching to minimize build time. The company offers Earthly Satellites, a managed remote build service, for teams that need consistent build performance in CI. Founded in 2020 with backing from Uncork Capital and 468 Capital, Earthly has gained adoption among developer teams frustrated with the complexity of existing CI systems and the inconsistency of language-specific build tools. It competes with Bazel, Make, and language-specific build systems in the reproducible build market.