How Framer keeps CI under 5 minutes with Namespace

“Namespace is really nicely plug-and-play on top of GitHub Actions, but then it also extends it in a really sensible way. It’s a great extension that adds a lot of value on top of what GitHub offers.”

Under 5 minCI target across hundreds of jobs

60+%in cost reduction in CI

Framer is a web design tool for design professionals. You design a professional website, click publish, and it’s live. It recently launched powerful design agents that help you design, dig into your analytics, or set up your CMS your desired way. Framer’s customers are teams all around the world, many of them marketing teams that need to maintain a nicely designed, well-performing website as a group. Framer is used and trusted by DoorDash, Perplexity, Miro, Zapier, and countless others.

When Eelco’s team needed CI that was faster than standard GitHub Actions and flexible enough to run a large test suite, they turned to Namespace.

Problem: CI build times creeping past the five-minute threshold

For a fast-moving engineering team, slow CI is rarely a one-time problem. At Framer it was a recurring one: build times had a way of quietly creeping up, so every so often the team would step back and look at the whole pipeline holistically. The last time they did that, tests had crept up to around 10 minutes.

Part of the problem was how many CI systems had accumulated over the years. Framer was running a lot of CircleCI, some AWS CodeBuild and CodePipeline workflows, and a bunch of GitHub Actions. The CircleCI setup in particular had become unwieldy, so the team decided to consolidate onto GitHub Actions. But that raised a new question: how do you run all of it efficiently? Standard GitHub Actions simply wasn’t fast enough, and it lacked the capabilities Framer wanted, especially around caching and observability. Above all, the team wanted to run a lot of tests and still have CI finish in under five minutes, and that number wasn’t arbitrary.

“Five minutes is the sweet spot where it’s kind of okay to wait for CI and not fully switch tasks to something else. Anything above that just becomes a drag waiting on CI.”

Hitting that target was harder than it sounds. Framer’s biggest repository is closer to a monorepo, and just checking out the code already took 30 seconds to a minute. Fast in absolute terms, but a real problem when the team wanted preview builds and other jobs ready in seconds, not minutes.

Solution: Selecting Namespace over self-hosting and GitHub

Before looking outside, Framer weighed building its CI infrastructure in-house. The team runs a lot in-house, but only when it’s core to the product. Framer has no platform or tooling team by design, keeping engineers focused on Framer itself.

“Building your own servers and running your own data centers is so far beyond the expertise that I’d want my engineers to have an interest in. Outsourcing that to Namespace is a no-brainer.”

Framer discovered Namespace through an “awesome runners” list of alternative GitHub Actions runners, and evaluated a couple of other options. What stood out was how easy it was to get going. The team could create an account and start testing without putting in a credit card or talking to sales first. And because Namespace runners are a drop-in replacement for GitHub Actions, migrating meant changing a single line in their Workflows.

From there, Framer leaned on the features standard GitHub Actions lacked: powerful caching, custom base images for their Playwright end-to-end tests, our flexible machine shapes with more CPU and memory, and SSH access into machines, a capability the team had valued in CircleCI that isn’t native to GitHub Actions.

“SSH is a very handy way to debug a failing test. Sometimes you have a test that only fails on CI, and figuring that out with CI being a black box is tedious. Being able to go into a machine and run the specific test by hand, in those rare cases that it’s needed, is very nice.”

The value became even clearer once Framer started working with our team directly. As Framer scaled and its needs evolved, we stayed responsive and flexible. When they need more capacity, a single Slack message gets a new contract turned around within hours.

“Working with the Namespace team is very pleasant. It’s a solid product, the team is super responsive, and they’re clearly passionate about what they’re doing while asking a fair price for it.”

Results: Faster CI across hundreds of jobs and 60+% cost reduction

Today, about 90% of Framer’s CI runs on Namespace, with only a few tasks still on CircleCI (for now). The team shaved 40 seconds to a minute off jobs across hundreds of them, meaningful time saved at that scale, and did it while spending 60+% less than they did before on CI, even while using more compute minutes.

The demand for CI keeps growing, too. With coding agents, Framer’s engineers spin up more PRs and prototypes than ever, and the team has seen roughly a 25% increase in output. More experimentation means more test runs, and at that volume it isn’t just speed that matters but visibility into where all those jobs are spending time. That’s the other half of what we give Framer.

“I often go to the Namespace dashboard to get a high-level overview of how all my jobs are doing and their runtimes, and then drill all the way down into the nitty-gritty: the logs, the CPU usage. That’s really well built.”

If your CI is slow, or creeping up on you again, give us a try. You only need to change one line.