The best macOS runners for GitHub Actions in 2026

Every service that runs GitHub Actions jobs on a Mac, on one page: price per minute and per job, chip and memory, billing, Xcode, jobs at once and free minutes, with a public benchmark on the Wikipedia iOS app. Checked November 2, 2026.

November 2, 2026 · 7 min read

Running macOS jobs on GitHub Actions? NoMac CI gives every job a fresh Mac with Xcode for $0.90 an hour, billed per minute. See NoMac CI →

If your iOS or macOS builds run on GitHub Actions, the macOS runner is the biggest line on the CI bill and usually the longest wait in the pipeline. GitHub's own runner is a 3-core M1 at $0.062 a minute, and a whole market now sells faster or cheaper Macs behind one runs-on line.

This guide puts every service that runs GitHub Actions jobs on a Mac on one page: price, machine, billing, Xcode, how many jobs run at once and how to start. Every figure was read from the vendor's own pages on November 2, 2026. Disclosure: we make NoMac CI, one of the options, and it is marked where it appears.

The short answer

• ·Lowest price per job, no subscription: NoMac CI, $0.90 an hour (1.5¢ a minute) on 6 cores and 8 GB, the lowest per-minute price on this list without a plan. GetMac is cheaper per minute only when a monthly plan's minutes are all used.
• ·Open-source projects: GitHub's standard macOS runner is free and unlimited in public repositories.
• ·The most memory per job: Blacksmith, Depot and Avrea (24 GB on their smallest Mac), and Namespace's larger shapes, up to 56 GB.
• ·Already paying Bitrise: Build Hub, at $0.03 a minute from a monthly budget.

Every macOS runner, side by side

The smallest Mac each one sells, and what a 15-minute job costs on it. Prices are per minute in private repositories.

Measured: the Wikipedia app's unit tests

A faster Mac means fewer minutes, so price per minute is only half the bill. We ran the Wikipedia iOS app's own unit tests (its public repository at commit ca8aaeb9, the Wikipedia scheme, 430 tests) on GitHub's standard runner and on NoMac CI, 16 times each, the two jobs started together, from a cold start, with Xcode 27.0 and an iPhone 17 on iOS 27.0 on both. It is the same app other runner benchmarks use. Every run is public with its logs, and the workflow runs in any fork: NoMac-app/ios-ci-benchmark.

NoMac CI finished the job 2.7 times faster. Its Mac takes longer to start, since every job gets a new VM: about 39s from queued to running, against 4s on GitHub. One flaky test in the app failed once on each side; those runs are included. Measured November 2 and 3, 2026.

The services, one by one

GitHub-hosted runners

Nothing to set up and one bill. The standard runner behind macos-latest is a 3-core M1 with 7 GB, and macos-latest still defaults to Xcode 26.6; Xcode 27 lives on the separate xcode-27 label. The faster M2 Pro xlarge costs $0.102 a minute and needs a Team or Enterprise plan. Each plan includes $12 to $18 of usage a month, about 190 to 290 standard macOS minutes. GitHub postponed a planned $0.002 a minute charge on self-hosted runners in December 2025 and has not set a new date, so the third-party runners below carry no GitHub fee today.

NoMac CI (ours)

A fresh macOS VM per job on 6 cores and 8 GB of an Apple M4 to M6, with Xcode 27.0, billed per minute from prepaid credit at $0.90 an hour with no subscription. It works on personal accounts and organizations and runs two jobs at once on every account, each for up to 6 hours. The same credit pays for NoMac Macs and cloud iPhones.

Bitrise Build Hub

Bitrise's GitHub Actions runners: an M4 with 5 vCPU and 14 GB at $0.03 a minute, paid from a monthly budget that starts at $15 and resets each month. When the budget runs out, jobs wait unless pay-as-you-go is on, at twice the rate. New Xcode versions arrive within a day.

Namespace

Fast runners on M5 Max and M4 Pro, eight macOS shapes up to 16 vCPU and 56 GB, with an Xcode build cache. The 6 vCPU, 14 GB shape is $0.06 a minute of a plan's minutes and $0.09 beyond them; the free Developer plan stops jobs at 3 hours.

WarpBuild, Blacksmith, Depot and Avrea

Four drop-in runners at $0.08 a minute for their smallest Mac. WarpBuild has 6 vCPU and 14 GB with no plan fee; Blacksmith 6 vCPU and 24 GB with a monthly free allowance; Depot 8 CPUs and 24 GB on a plan from $20 a month, billed per second, with an Xcode compilation cache; Avrea 8 vCPU and 24 GB of an M5 Max, billed per second.

Tenki and GetMac

Tenki bills per second with no minimum: its 2 vCPU, 4 GB Mac is $0.04 a minute, and sizes over 4 vCPU need its Team plan. GetMac sells monthly plans of included minutes on a 4-core M4 with 8 GB, the lowest price per minute here when every minute is used; when they run out, jobs wait.

Not on the list

• ·Cirrus Runners has taken no new customers since April 2026 (moving off it).
• ·BuildJet, still named on some lists, shut down in March 2026. RunsOn and Ubicloud sell no macOS runners.
• ·CircleCI, Codemagic, Xcode Cloud and Bitrise CI run their own pipelines, not GitHub Actions: see CircleCI, Codemagic, Xcode Cloud and Bitrise.
• ·A Mac mini of your own as a self-hosted runner: the cost and the upkeep.

Switching is one line

Every runner on this list is picked per job by its runs-on label. Moving a job from GitHub's runner to NoMac CI:

jobs:
  test:
-   runs-on: macos-latest
+   runs-on: nomac
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v5

Steps, actions and secrets stay as they are, and switching back is the same line. To try NoMac CI, connect GitHub and read the docs.