Alternatives to Orchard for CI on a Mac
Orchard and kinhin solve different problems, so the right alternative depends on what you need.
Orchard is a controller and workers that manage Tart VMs across a cluster of Apple Silicon Macs, with a CLI and a REST API. It schedules VMs. It does not connect to a CI service, so you still need something that turns a queued CI job into a VM.
kinhin is that second part. It watches the queue of your CI service, decides how many runners the queue needs, and places them on one Mac. It is a CI runner autoscaler, not a cluster.
If you need CI runners on one Mac
- kinhin: queue-driven autoscaling for GitHub Actions, GitLab, Gitea and Forgejo, with a menu bar app and a daemon.
- runscaler: a command-line autoscaler for GitHub Actions. Pick it when you use only GitHub and want a small tool.
- Cilicon and Tartelet: macOS apps that run ephemeral Tart VMs as runners. Both are smaller in scope.
- GitLab Runner with the Tart executor: one VM per job, with concurrency set by hand in
config.toml.
If you need many Macs
kinhin manages the Mac it runs on and does not schedule across machines. For a fleet of Macs, an orchestrator is the better foundation. Orchard is one. Commercial options are Anka Build and Orka, which both run VM fleets with central management.
The comparison has the detail on each tool, with links to their documentation.