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Harness vs Jenkins comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
8.6
Harness improves efficiency, reduces deployment and development time, increases success rates, and offers positive ROI with low maintenance costs.
Sentiment score
8.5
Jenkins provides excellent ROI by being free, enhancing satisfaction, streamlining deployment, reducing errors, and lowering costs.
By adopting templates and various different pipelines across our own IDP platform, we have saved upwards of 30 to 40% of development time.
Technical Associate at ZS
I believe the efficiency improvement is more than a twenty to thirty percent increase compared to Jenkins.
Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
With Harness, the release process decreased from three or four hours to one or two hours, making deployments much quicker.
Software Engineer at Citi
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
8.1
Harness offers efficient and proactive support with quick resolution and communication, often allowing internal teams to manage incidents.
Sentiment score
6.5
Jenkins relies on robust community support for answers, while CloudBees offers varying response times for additional assistance.
We have not faced any customer support issues, with tickets resolved in less than a four-day SLA.
Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
We have rarely faced issues with Harness tech support.
Senior AWS Consultant at Quantum Integrators
We have been receiving incident reports whenever an incident occurs on Harness, and they are usually quick to respond.
Technical Associate at ZS
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Harness provides highly scalable SaaS for teams, efficiently managing applications with minimal performance issues, ideal for enterprise growth.
Sentiment score
7.2
Jenkins is scalable and adaptable, effectively managing many jobs, with enhanced capabilities via Kubernetes and Docker integration.
Our entire organization uses it with hundreds of applications, and it supports this scale effectively.
Senior Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
It is able to work on our infrastructure side, which is EKS, and we are able to handle our organization growth effectively for an enterprise use case.
Technical Associate at ZS
Currently, out of twenty teams that are supposed to adopt it, five or six have adopted Harness, and we have not seen any kind of scalability issues, such as slowness in performance or build time reduction.
Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
Harness is stable with smooth production performance, though issues arise with over twenty applications and rare downtime reports.
Sentiment score
7.1
Jenkins is generally stable with occasional issues, but performance improves significantly with better hardware and recent updates.
Harness is completely stable, and we are using it in production without facing any stability issues at all.
Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
We have rarely faced issues with Harness tech support.
Senior AWS Consultant at Quantum Integrators
Harness is decently stable.
Technical Associate at ZS
 

Room For Improvement

Harness needs improvements in clarity, setup simplification, security, automation, stability, UI, pipeline support, onboarding, and flexible pricing.
Jenkins requires UI/UX enhancements, plugin stability, better integration, improved documentation, and more effective troubleshooting for user satisfaction.
There is no way to execute nested pipelines, which means that we cannot execute child pipelines within child pipelines and child pipelines even within those child pipelines.
Technical Associate at ZS
Harness can be improved by providing more clarity on the credits it issues for Harness Cloud, as it has a tiered pricing structure involving license and credit costs, which can get confusing.
Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
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.
Software Engineer at Citi
 

Setup Cost

Jenkins is cost-effective and open-source, with additional costs for infrastructure and an enterprise edition offering extra features.
From what I understand with respect to Harness, licensing and setup costs were relatively low for an enterprise, and the pricing was more catered toward enterprises who would invest in the technology.
Technical Associate at ZS
 

Valuable Features

Harness accelerates deployment with intelligent caching, AI error detection, enhanced safety, and improved team coordination and compliance visibility.
Jenkins excels in automation, integration, and scalability with its robust ecosystem, enhancing collaboration, efficiency, and reliability.
Harness uses AI to suggest errors in case of deployment failures.
Senior Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
One of the best features Harness offers is the ability to templatize pipelines.
Technical Associate at ZS
The best features in Harness are its user-friendliness and setup configuration.
Senior AWS Consultant at Quantum Integrators
 

Categories and Ranking

Harness
Ranking in Build Automation
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (16th), Cloud Cost Management (7th), Feature Management (1st)
Jenkins
Ranking in Build Automation
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
92
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Harness is 5.5%, down from 5.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jenkins is 7.2%, down from 11.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Build Automation Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Jenkins7.2%
Harness5.5%
Other87.3%
Build Automation
 

Featured Reviews

MK
Technical Associate at ZS
Templatized pipelines have improved efficiency while limitations in code-based development remain
Harness UI can do a lot of good things. Harness's UI should not feel very complicated. At the current stage, it feels very commercialized and compared to other platforms such as Argo CD or Jenkins, which feel much more lively and much more simple. Infrastructure as code or pipeline as code is something that Harness severely lacks. There is not a lot of good support for pipeline as code, and I often find myself not using pipeline as code the way other platforms such as GitHub Actions or Jenkins integrate pipeline as code. Pipeline as code is definitely one of the disadvantages when it comes to Harness. Additionally, the entire platform feels very commercialized, which is something that a lot of developers, especially open-source enthusiasts, might not appreciate even within the organization. One of the very important key factors I observed was that there is no way to execute nested pipelines, which means that we cannot execute child pipelines within child pipelines and child pipelines even within those child pipelines. There is no way to execute nested pipeline execution, which may or may not be required based on the use case, but it is definitely one of those features that I wish the platform had.
AllenUmlas - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at Etisalat
Streamlines the CI/CD process with its user-friendly interface, extensive plugin ecosystem and efficient automation capabilities
Jenkins is incredibly user-friendly, so I haven't encountered any difficulties using it. It's the only product I've used for automation, but I find it to be very intuitive and effective. Jenkins has been instrumental in automating our build and deployment processes. We're leveraging Jenkins to automate tasks related to Telco, particularly in upgrading the manual orchestration. It's a critical tool for streamlining our operations.
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Comparison Review

it_user184734 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Administrator at Facebook
Jan 22, 2015
I generally find TeamCity a lot more intuitive than Jenkins.
Moving to TeamCity from Jenkins At work, we’re slowly migrating from Jenkins to TeamCity in the hope of ending some of our recurring problems with continuous integration. My use of Jenkins prior to this job has been almost strictly on a personal basis, although I pretty much only use Travis…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
29%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Retailer
5%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business28
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise57
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Harness?
It's a highly customizable DevOps tool.
What needs improvement with Harness?
The first point for improvement is the steep learning curve, where concepts such as services, environment, pipelines, and templates take time to understand. New users often need training before bec...
What is your primary use case for Harness?
My main use case for Harness is continuous deployment (CD), specifically for safe, automated deployment to production, especially in Kubernetes and cloud environments. For continuous deployment in ...
How does Tekton compare with Jenkins?
When you are evaluating tools for automating your own GitOps-based CI/CD workflow, it is important to keep your requirements and use cases in mind. Tekton deployment is complex and it is not very e...
What do you like most about Jenkins?
Jenkins has been instrumental in automating our build and deployment processes.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Jenkins?
Jenkins is used in many companies to save money, especially within R&D divisions, by avoiding the expenses of proprietary tools.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Armory
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Linedata, Openbank, Home Depot, Advanced
Airial, Clarus Financial Technology, cubetutor, Metawidget, mysocio, namma, silverpeas, Sokkva, So Rave, tagzbox
Find out what your peers are saying about Harness vs. Jenkins and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
882,637 professionals have used our research since 2012.