The Claude Code GitHub Action runs an agent inside your CI pipeline. Ellipsis runs the same kind of agents as a managed service, with the triggers, permissions, cost controls, and team-wide visibility you would otherwise build and maintain yourself.
| Infrastructure to run it | Managed cloud sandboxes, nothing to host | You provision and maintain the CI runners and workflows |
| Startup time | Warm sandboxes in seconds, dependencies baked into a cached image | Every run boots a runner, checks out, and reinstalls dependencies |
| Triggers | Pull requests, pushes, cron, and @ellipsis in Slack and Linear | GitHub events inside your CI only |
| Scheduled agents | Native cron schedules | Scheduled workflows you build and maintain |
| Team-wide observability | Every session, cost, and diff in one dashboard | Scattered across workflow logs, one run at a time |
| Spend controls | Per session, day, week, and month caps, enforced live | You track API spend yourself |
| Permissions | Per-agent GitHub token scopes, enforced at the mint | Whatever the workflow and token happen to allow |
| Audit trail | Every action and every config version recorded | CI run logs, retained per your CI |
| Code review on every PR | Built in, from any agent or engineer | A separate thing you build and maintain |
| Agent definition | One versioned YAML per agent, deployed with git push | Workflow YAML focused on CI steps, not the agent |
| Secrets | Central, write-only sandbox secrets store | GitHub Secrets, managed per repo |
| Isolation and retention | Ephemeral sandbox per session, zero source code retention | Depends on how your runner is set up |
A CI workflow pays the same tax on every run: boot a runner, check out the repo, install dependencies. Ellipsis bakes the install into a cached sandbox image, so the first session at a commit pays it once and every session after starts with your packages already on disk. Measured on our own monorepo: 56.8 seconds once, then 2.9 seconds.
A CI runner repeats the checkout and dependency install on every run. Ellipsis pays it once per commit, then starts each sandbox from the cached image with the packages already on disk.
One cold build, then every session starts warm
A CI job leaves its output in scattered workflow logs, one run at a time. Ellipsis records every session in one dashboard: how it was triggered, what it changed, what it cost, and the full step-by-step trace, across every repo and every agent your team runs.
Every session, cost, and diff in one shared dashboard
The GitHub Action can do whatever its workflow and token allow. With Ellipsis each agent's GitHub token is narrowed to the permissions and repos its YAML grants, enforced by GitHub at the mint, and spend is capped per session, per day, and per month while the agent runs.
Permissions minted per session, enforced by GitHub
See the reasoning behind every change, not just the change. Each session records the agent's thinking, the tools it called, the tests it ran, and the diff it shipped, so a failed or surprising session is something you can actually inspect.
Thinking, tool calls, tests, and the diff it shipped
Run your agents as a managed service, with the triggers, governance, and visibility a CI workflow leaves to you.