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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
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (16th), Cloud Cost Management (9th), 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 January 2026, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Harness is 5.8%, up from 5.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jenkins is 7.5%, down from 11.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Build Automation Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Jenkins7.5%
Harness5.8%
Other86.7%
Build Automation
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2787357 - PeerSpot reviewer
Site Reliability Engineer at Granicus Inc.
Automated delivery has made production releases safer and has reduced deployment incidents
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 becoming productive, resulting in slower initial onboarding compared to simpler CD tools. An improvement idea is better guided onboarding with more opinionated defaults and examples. The second improvement can be on UI complexity and navigation; the UI can feel cluttered with many options and finding past executions, logs, or specific settings sometimes takes extra clicks, leading to small but noticeable productivity loss. Simplified UI views for common workflows and improved search and filtering could help. I also see cost and licensing as potential areas for improvement, as pricing can feel high for small teams and advanced features are tied to higher tiers, which may limit adoption for startups or smaller organizations. Flexible pricing models and more essential features in lower tiers could address this issue.
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

"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%."
"Harness starts integrating with organizations, making everything automated without the need for manual interruption."
"The features of Harness are valuable, supporting rolling deployments, basic deployments, and blue-green deployments with zero downtime."
"Harness integrates all functions like execution pipelines, environment checks, and log monitoring in one place."
"Everything in Harness is configured and runs smoothly."
"It's a highly customizable DevOps tool."
"Harness integrates all functions like execution pipelines, environment checks, and log monitoring in one place, making it convenient."
"Production deployments are faster and more reliable, especially for Kubernetes and cloud-based services, with significant reduction in deployment-related incidents, faster recovery when issues occur, faster, more confident releases, increased deployment frequency with higher confidence, and better governance and compliance that improved visibility and coordination across Dev, QA, Ops, and SRE teams."
"It's very easy to learn."
"Jenkins integrates with multiple tools like Bitbucket and makes life easier. We don't have to write a lot of code since a lot of libraries are available."
"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."
"With Jenkins, the pipeline will take your code from any versioning system like GitHub or Bitbucket. All the security scans can happen in one go and then all the tests also get run. You can just build one container in it and deploy it."
"I love Jenkins. I like that you work on anything, and you make anything. Jenkins is very important for my team. I am satisfied with the product."
"It offers continuous deployment and continuous testing. It enables us to figure out anything."
"Jenkins is free and open source."
"Jenkins has a lot of built-in packages and tools."
 

Cons

"When integrating Harness with more than twenty applications in one place, it becomes less stable, causing improvements to be necessary."
"There's also room for improvement in debugging pipeline issues, which can sometimes become complex."
"Even with automation, there's a requirement for manual change requests for approvals."
"When deploying multiple components to multiple environments, like production and BCP, failures sometimes occur. Improvements are needed when deploying one component to one environment."
"The first point for improvement is the steep learning curve, where concepts such as services, environment, pipelines, and templates take time to understand."
"Infrastructure as code or pipeline as code is something that Harness severely lacks."
"I prefer the previous less compact UI version of Harness, which showed more details on the screen."
"Harness setup and configurations could be made easier to configure, which would be helpful."
"Tasks such as deployment, cloning, database switchover, and all other database missions and tasks are being done through Jenkins. If a job does not go through, at times the error message does not clearly indicate what caused the failure. I have to escalate it to the Jenkins DevOps team just to see what caused the failure. If the error message is clear, then I wouldn't have to escalate the issue to different teams."
"I sometimes face a bottleneck when installing the plugins on an offline machine. Mapping the dependencies and then installing the correct sequence of dependencies is a nightmare, and it took me two days to do it."
"Jenkins could improve in areas related to Kubernetes and Docker container integration, like machine allocation of nodes and Marshaling integration improvements."
"I would like them to provide space for people to have a central node that stores all the logs of workspace information in a distributed fashion to facilitate backup and restoration. Currently, everything is stored on one node, so you need to set up distributed storage or an endpoint that you can use for backing up your information."
"Creating a new SonarQube project requires a separate job, and we've encountered some integration issues with Docker and the need for better vulnerability checks."
"Jenkins takes a long time to create archive files."
"Performance-wise. This needs to be improved. Not only performance-wise, some functionality or some features can be added to Jenkins."
"Jenkins can sometimes run slow, especially when restarting after a plugin installation or when returning from a pipeline view to the dashboard."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The open-source version is free, but small companies would not be able to afford the cloud-based version."
"There is no cost. It is open source."
"We are using the free version of Jenkins. There are no costs or licensing."
"It is a free product."
"​It is free.​"
"Jenkins is a free solution, it is open source."
"Jenkins is open-source, so it is free."
"Jenkins is an open-source platform."
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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%
Government
5%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Large Enterprise7
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?
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
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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.
881,036 professionals have used our research since 2012.