Buildkite vs Harness comparison

Buildkite and Harness are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Buildkite is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.2, while Harness is ranked #10 with an average rating of 7.7. Additionally, 92% of Buildkite users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Harness users who would recommend it.

Buildkite

Read 14 Buildkite reviews

254 Views
99 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Harness

Read 3 Harness reviews

2,131 Views
1,455 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Buildkite

Harness

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

Harness and Buildkite are competing products in continuous integration and delivery. Data comparisons suggest Buildkite holds a slight edge in flexibility and scalability, while Harness is favored for its intuitive automation capabilities.

Features: Harness is known for automated deployment pipelines, centralized logging, and support for complex workflows. Buildkite offers customizable pipelines, superior control over build environments, and flexibility.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Harness provides a cloud-based deployment model, simplifying setup with proactive customer support. Buildkite uses a hybrid model, allowing infrastructure control but requiring more technical setup. Its service emphasizes responsiveness, though it might need more technical assistance.

Pricing and ROI: Harness offers a flexible pricing model focused on cost-effective automation, leading to a favorable ROI by reducing time and resources in manual processes. Buildkite's competitive pricing is favored by larger enterprises who prioritize control and customization, with potential for higher initial costs offset by tailored deployments.

To learn more, read our detailed Buildkite vs. Harness Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite vs. Harness

April 2025

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Helped 848,207 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Buildkite

Ranking in Build Automation

8th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Harness

Ranking in Build Automation

10th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (31st), Cloud Cost Management (15th)

Featured Reviews

Prabin Silwal

Senior Engineering Consultant at ASSURANCE IQ, INC.

Has an easy setup phase while also offering good documentation

The problem we are facing sometimes is that we have lots of unit testers, and we have to wait about ten minutes to complete all of those because we want to run or find a way. It's not directly due to the limitation of the tool as well, but when we are running the spec, we want to run those parallelly and decrease the downtime so that our deployment can be faster. I think that one is not possible only due to the it also depends upon the unit test framework as well we are using. When we tried with the multiple test cases in a parallel manner, there were some dependencies, and one over another kept failing. We make those sequential calls. The aforementioned area consists of the issues my company faced while using Buildkite.

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Linwei Yuan

Software Engineer at Citi

Streamline microservices deployment with integrated execution pipelines and comprehensive monitoring

Harness integrates all functions like execution pipelines, environment checks, and log monitoring in one place. It is very convenient since we have many microservices, so having one platform for all of them is beneficial. The dashboard allows me to monitor all core services' deployment status in one place, making it easier to find bugs and check logs.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The solution can be considered as a very well-polished platform with a really great UI."

"Using Buildkite, it's much easier to manage pipelines. It's straightforward to understand what each pipeline returns, making it easy to edit configurations, such as passwords. Although there is a steep learning curve initially, the overall process is still comprehensible. Additionally, Buildkite offers features like hooks and triggers; for example, an action in the app can automatically trigger a pipeline. These elements can be added to specific pipelines, ensuring the entire process is automated."

"Buildkite's UI is particularly intuitive, making it simple to add steps to your pipeline. It also provides detailed logging."

"Buildkite makes it easier to conduct deployment. When I merge a PR in Buildkite, it automatically starts the deployment process. It used to be challenging to shift code from the development branch to the testing branch because I had to follow up with multiple developers. Previously, I was dependent on the DevOps team and developers to handle deployments, but now it allows me to deploy the solutions myself.This has made it much easier for me to handle both non-production and production environments."

"Buildkite allows us to build automations and integration tasks effectively."

"The product's initial setup phase was easy."

"The tool's flexibility with pipelines gave us a lot of advantages, especially when managing a huge amount of microservices."

"They have great plugins, scalability, UI, and pipeline options. They also offer webhooks that allow integration with custom setups to send events dynamically."

More Buildkite pros

"Harness integrates all functions like execution pipelines, environment checks, and log monitoring in one place."

"Harness integrates all functions like execution pipelines, environment checks, and log monitoring in one place, making it convenient."

"Harness starts integrating with organizations, making everything automated without the need for manual interruption."

"It's a highly customizable DevOps tool."

Cons

"I would like to see some improvements in the hooks implementation."

"Most of our projects involve both front-end and back-end development. We write the code and then create a file to set up our process, including specifying the tests we want to run. Before deploying to production, we need to install and configure certain things. We need something like Docker Pro, but I'm unsure about that. I'm familiar with the steps for using Buildkite for this process. We start by defining which tests to run."

"The way Buildkite represents workflows can be challenging. It uses Directed Acyclic Graphs, and there's a trade-off between abstraction and understanding what goes wrong when something fails. When a layer of jobs breaks down, it can be difficult to identify the issue at first glance. Additionally, logging can be cumbersome. I prefer GitHub Workflows."

"BuildKite should follow some providers like GitHub Actions. They can offer a shared agent or cloud agent."

"Compared to market leaders like Azure DevOps and Jenkins, Buildkite's community is smaller, but they do have some documentation."

"It gets very complex if you want the tool to scale automatically."

"Based on the load, the agents can be scaled up and scaled down, and while they are scaling up, sometimes they just get stuck."

"There is a need for rework occasionally, and issues like syntax errors can occur multiple times, especially when manual changes are made in AWS or Amazon Connect that are not captured in the code."

More Buildkite cons

"When integrating Harness with more than twenty applications in one place, it becomes less stable, causing improvements to be necessary."

"Even with automation, there's a requirement for manual change requests for approvals."

"I prefer the previous less compact UI version of Harness, which showed more details on the screen."

"There's also room for improvement in debugging pipeline issues, which can sometimes become complex."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's per-user pricing model suits huge enterprises but is expensive for small to medium businesses."

"I don't think the tool is expensive."

"We used the solution’s free version."

"For a business plan, it was 19 USD per month per user."

"I find Buildkite cost-effective as it has definitely increased my productivity, especially on the deployment side. It saved a lot of my time and improved data management because I can handle different environments myself now."

"Buildkite is known to be cheaper than GitHub Workflows, which is considered a standard in the industry. It can be cost-effective, especially for organizations that heavily utilize Docker and containerization, because every code change triggers a new build. Its integration with AWS, particularly with ECR, and its caching capabilities with layers are powerful features."

"The self-hosted option is pretty cheap."

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Financial Services Firm

33%

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Buildkite?

One area that needs improvement in Buildkite is the requirement for rework of the code. There can be syntax errors when running the Buildkite pipeline, especially if someone has made manual changes...

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What is your primary use case for Buildkite?

I use Buildkite for deployment tasks related to building AMI images and deploying routing profile queues into Amazon Connect. This involves using Buildkite in conjunction with GitHub. We create fil...

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What advice do you have for others considering Buildkite?

With two years of experience on Buildkite, I would recommend it to others due to its manageable pipeline and the support team available for big issues. I am satisfied with it, rating its stability ...

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What do you like most about Harness?

It's a highly customizable DevOps tool.

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What needs improvement with Harness?

Previously, when deploying a version that had been deployed successfully before, it sometimes failed upon trying again, which seems to be an intermittent issue about stability. I prefer the previou...

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What is your primary use case for Harness?

I used Harness for CICD, and it served as the release platform that our team used for Java applications. We do Java microservices, and we used it to deploy them.

See all answers

Comparisons

GitHub Actions vs Buildkite

Compared 53% of the time

Tekton vs Buildkite

Compared 24% of the time

JFrog Pipeline vs Buildkite

Compared 22% of the time

More Buildkite Competitors

Jenkins vs Harness

Compared 19% of the time

GitHub Actions vs Harness

Compared 18% of the time

TeamCity vs Harness

Compared 14% of the time

Tekton vs Harness

Compared 13% of the time

GitLab vs Harness

Compared 8% of the time

More Harness Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite

April 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Build Automation

April 2025

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Also Known As

No data available

Armory

Overview

Buildkite is a powerful CI/CD tool praised for its scalability and flexibility in automating and managing complex workflows across multiple platforms. Its integration capabilities with various systems and supports for secure, customizable environments enhance development efficiency and data privacy. The feedback highlights significant boosts in productivity and operational cost reduction, making Buildkite a strategic asset for businesses aiming to streamline development tasks and align with organizational goals.

Buildkite

Harness offers a comprehensive toolset for automating deployment processes and enhancing software update efficiency. It's lauded for its CI/CD capabilities, feature flagging, and real-time deployment monitoring. Key features include an intuitive UI, secret management, and robust rollback functionalities, all contributing to improved productivity and reduced errors in DevOps environments.

Harness

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Linedata, Openbank, Home Depot, Advanced

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite vs. Harness

April 2025

Free Report: Buildkite vs. Harness

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