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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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Harness
Ranking in Build Automation
7th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (17th), Cloud Cost Management (8th), Feature Management (2nd)
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 December 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Harness is 6.2%, up from 5.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jenkins is 8.2%, down from 11.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Build Automation Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Jenkins8.2%
Harness6.2%
Other85.6%
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.
JI
Principal Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
Efficient resource allocation and robust workflow with autoscaling capabilities
In Kubernetes, we use node-based architecture with nodes and pods and follow practices like RBAC and rollback. Multiple pods can run concurrently. We benefit from Kubernetes' ability to autoscale pods and use horizontal pod autoscalers to adjust the number of pods based on metrics like CPU or memory usage, ensuring efficient resource allocation and stability under load.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Harness starts integrating with organizations, making everything automated without the need for manual interruption."
"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."
"By adopting templates and various different pipelines across our own IDP platform, we have saved upwards of 30 to 40% of development time and also reduced risks of failures or error rates by upwards of 70%."
"It's a highly customizable DevOps tool."
"Everything in Harness is configured and runs smoothly."
"The features of Harness are valuable, supporting rolling deployments, basic deployments, and blue-green deployments with zero downtime."
"It can scale easily."
"We are using the open-source version and there is a lot of plugins and features that are available and it works on agents for free. In other solutions, it will cost extra to use them with the agent."
"It's a powerful tool for CI/CD."
"Jenkins is stable, user-friendly, and helps with continuous integration. As of today, I can't see any tool that's better than Jenkins."
"It's very easy to learn."
"This solution has helped us in automating the build and test process, reducing time."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its integration between different tools."
"The most valuable aspect of this solution is that there are multiple features. We can abstract certain variables and then build our deployment routine while being able to do some abstraction onto the SSH connections."
 

Cons

"Infrastructure as code or pipeline as code is something that Harness severely lacks."
"Even with automation, there's a requirement for manual change requests for approvals."
"Harness setup and configurations could be made easier to configure, which would be helpful."
"When integrating Harness with more than twenty applications in one place, it becomes less stable, causing improvements to be necessary."
"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."
"When deploying multiple components to multiple environments, like production and BCP, failures sometimes occur. Improvements are needed when deploying one component to one environment."
"Improvement-wise, I would want the solution's user interface to be changed for the better. In short, the solution can be made more user-friendly."
"A more user-friendly UI for creating pipelines would be helpful."
"In our case, we have several products built using Jenkins. It is quite difficult to navigate into the latest stable build in a given OS."
"The learning curve is quite steep at the moment."
"The upgrades need improvement."
"Jenkins could improve by adding the ability to edit test automation and make time planning better because it is difficult. It should be easier to do."
"Jenkins can improve by continuing to add additional plugins for all the new solutions that are coming out within the cloud sphere."
"The disadvantage of Jenkins is writing Groovy scripts. There are other CI tools where you do not need to write this many scripts to manage and deploy."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Jenkins is open-source, so it is free."
"Jenkins is an open-source platform."
"I used the free OSS version all the time. It was enough for all my needs."
"The solution is one of the lowest costs compared to competitors."
"Jenkins is open source and free."
"Jenkins is a free open-source server."
"In our company, we do pay for the licensing of the solution."
"We are using the free version of Jenkins. There is not a license required to use the solution because it is open-source."
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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
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business28
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise56
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Harness?
It's a highly customizable DevOps tool.
What needs improvement with Harness?
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,...
What is your primary use case for Harness?
Harness has been implemented in our organization for one of our clients for approximately 8 to 10 months. Harness is particularly utilized for our infrastructure provisioning pipelines and our RITM...
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: December 2025.
879,310 professionals have used our research since 2012.