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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
6th
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 (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

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

"Harness starts integrating with organizations, making everything automated without the need for manual interruption."
"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."
"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 integrates all functions like execution pipelines, environment checks, and log monitoring in one place, making it convenient."
"Everything in Harness is configured and runs smoothly."
"Harness integrates all functions like execution pipelines, environment checks, and log monitoring in one place."
"It's a highly customizable DevOps tool."
"The features of Harness are valuable, supporting rolling deployments, basic deployments, and blue-green deployments with zero downtime."
"Jenkins optimizes the CI/CD process, enhances automation, and ensures efficiency and management of our build and deployment pipeline."
"GitHub linking is pretty good. We have a deployment application where we can run our tests and add various variables to be passed as assertions to those tests. This is pretty fluid with Jenkins."
"Jenkins's open-based framework is very valuable."
"This solution has helped us in automating the build and test process, reducing time."
"Jenkins is stable, user-friendly, and helps with continuous integration. As of today, I can't see any tool that's better than Jenkins."
"The most valuable aspect of Jenkins is pipeline customization. Jenkins provides a declarative pipeline as well as a scripted pipeline. The scripted pipeline uses a programming language. You can customize it to your needs, so we use Jenkins because other solutions like Travis and Spinnaker don't allow much customization."
"The most valuable feature of Jenkins is its open source."
"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."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"The first point for improvement is the steep learning curve, where concepts such as services, environment, pipelines, and templates take time to understand."
"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."
"Infrastructure as code or pipeline as code is something that Harness severely lacks."
"The UI of Jenkins could improve."
"The major drawback with Jenkins is the lack of support."
"Some kind of SaaS product would be helpful in providing organizational structure."
"I think an integrated help button, that respected the context of the change/work in hand, would be a worthwhile improvement."
"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."
"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."
"I do not have any notes for improvement."
"Jenkins could improve in areas related to Kubernetes and Docker container integration, like machine allocation of nodes and Marshaling integration improvements."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"We are using the free version of Jenkins. There are no costs or licensing."
"It is an open source."
"Jenkins is open source and free."
"Some of the add-ons are too expensive."
"Jenkins is an open-source platform."
"It could be cheaper because there are many solutions available in the market. We are paying yearly."
"​It is free.​"
"Jenkins is open-source, so it is free."
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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
19%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
7%
 

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
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.
882,032 professionals have used our research since 2012.