NoMac vs Fastlane
Fastlane is free, open source and runs anywhere — on a Mac you own and maintain. That last clause is the entire trade.
What Fastlane is
The open-source automation toolkit almost every iOS pipeline is built on: lanes in Ruby, match for signing, deliver for metadata.
| Fastlane | NoMac | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free; you supply the Mac | $5 or $20/month; Mac included |
| Where it runs | A machine you maintain | Ephemeral cloud macOS VM per build |
| Signing | match, and your own key management | Managed from your ASC key |
| Failure output | Raw logs | Classified failure with the relevant excerpt |
| Learning curve | Real — lanes, plugins, signing | Two commands |
| Ceiling | Very high | The pipeline we ship |
Choose Fastlane when
- ·You own a Mac and are comfortable with Ruby and lane configuration.
- ·You want zero vendor cost and full control.
- ·Your setup is unusual enough that a fixed pipeline would not fit.
- ·You are automating something no product covers.
Choose NoMac when
- ·You do not have a Mac to run it on, which is the common case.
- ·You do not want to own certificate rotation, keychains and Ruby versions.
- ·You want an agent to call the tooling directly, with structured results.
- ·You would rather spend the evening on the app.
Fastlane is what everything else is built on, including a good deal of the industry. The question is whether you want to run it, or want the outcome it produces.
Ship it without a Mac.
Signed builds, TestFlight and App Store submission — driven by your agent.
Start shipping