Harness Reviews

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 ServiceNow requests.

With Harness CI/CD, one of our main use cases is using it as an infrastructure-provisioning pipeline. Harness allows us to have an end-to-end infrastructure pipeline, which connects our DevOps and our ServiceNow for governance and our custom portal, which we call an infrastructure-provisioning portal, and a central backend database through which we are able to provide a heterogeneous mixture of different resources including AWS, Databricks, Vault, IDMC, and GitHub repositories. Through this, we use Harness as the main platform where we are able to provision and manage all the pipeline executions as well as our requests that we receive for infrastructure provisioning.

Our team primarily interacts with Harness using their Pipeline Studio. That is one of our finest use cases, and currently, we are also looking forward to integrating Harness or working within Harness so that we can do more pipeline-as-code type development.

One of the best features Harness offers is the ability to templatize pipelines. Through template pipelines, we are able to reuse pipelines across different of our internal workstreams, and we are able to utilize various organization-level templates for various common use cases including ServiceNow RITM tickets or infrastructure-provisioning pipelines for Terraform.

Pipeline templatization has been a primary focus of my team, particularly because one of our infrastructure-provisioning requests always has a dependency on Terraform workspaces and GitHub creation. To address that, we resolved the issue by creating an end-to-end child pipeline that is part of our FTP platform. That pipeline is then utilized across all our different workstreams to provision Terraform workspaces and connect with Vault and GitHub IAC, so that we can effectively and reliably create infrastructure as code repositories. That is how we are able to work with templatization.

Harness Pipeline Studio is another feature that stands out. A good visual platform that allows us to see the pipeline end to end in an architectural manner is always helpful.

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.

Harness has been implemented in our organization for one of our clients for approximately 8 to 10 months.

Harness is decently stable. I do feel there has been some downtime, but it may be a problem with our platform or our teams internally. Overall, I feel the platform is stable enough.

Harness scalability is good. 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.

Although I have not directly interacted with customer support, we have been receiving incident reports whenever an incident occurs on Harness, and they are usually quick to respond, which is always an advantage.

Neutral

In my organization, we were and are still using GitHub Actions. GitHub Actions is the primarily CI/CD tool that we use, particularly because it comes with direct integration with our enterprise GitHub setup, and it is a natural tool that a lot of developers are familiar with in today's time. The reason why we shifted to Harness from GitHub Actions for a few of our edge use cases or newer use cases was because of pipeline templatization, a studio visual code development experience, as well as easy integration with other pipelines and templates that have been developed throughout the organization.

My organization opted for Harness through AWS Marketplace and by reaching out to professionals and support teams at Harness.

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%.

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. The price that they pay extra for that technology compared to what they would have paid for open-source is then offset by the number of projects they are able to onboard.

In our organization, the only other option that we really evaluated was Argo CD. We did not go for Argo CD primarily because it was already open-source, and while using it, it felt more catered specifically toward Kubernetes, which was great. Our use cases are varied because we work with different domains such as AI and data engineering. We are dealing with a heterogeneous set of architecture, and while Argo CD did integrate nicely with Kubernetes-based deployments, it lacks severely in those other areas where Harness shines.

For others looking to use Harness, they should first evaluate their own organization to determine if Harness really solves all their use cases. Harness is somewhat use-case dependent, meaning while it definitely lacks in pipeline as code, it is still able to provide a pipeline-based studio, which is something that is unique to the platform itself. It could be a great performance booster for teams that are working heavily with other aspects of the application stack and not focused completely on pipelines. My overall rating of Harness is 6 out of 10.

Harness is a delivery platform where we can create pipelines. I have been using Harness for deploying my application into my Kubernetes environment.

I had a couple of backend applications which used to talk with some other remote vendor-based services where they used to fetch data. For those applications' deployment I used Harness where I set up code push stages, build app stages, test stages, and then the deployment stage in Harness. Through Harness we deployed the code to my environment.

I set up those pipelines in the form of multiple environments. By multiple environments, I mean that normally we do have multiple environments such as dev, QA, pre-prod, and prod. What we used to do was have pipelines based on environments. For example, if the build happens and the Docker images are being created and then there comes a stage where it gets deployed. If everything works fine in the dev stage, it automatically gets deployed to the QA, then pre-prod and prod. All of these things were done by Harness, and Harness was so advanced that it used to understand the integration of those pipelines and it used to work in a coalition manner.

Harness is a managed platform that has a modern UI compared to the other CI/CD tools out there. It has built-in CI/CD features, and nowadays, it has AI features as well. AI-based troubleshooting, AI-based pipeline generation, and AI-based features are available. It also has test intelligence and automatic rollbacks. With AI, you can create scripts, and it requires less scripting, and it's commercial.

AI pipeline generation and AI test creation are two certain things which have really helped me. The reason being is that if my application requires or I'm onboarding a new application, I can use that AI pipeline generation feature to generate the pipeline and AI test creation also to create the test cases for my application. If something goes wrong, I can use AI troubleshooting to build or test my fails and analyze the logs, suggesting the fixes.

Using Harness, the deployment time has been reduced, plus the time taken during troubleshooting any issue is reduced, and the time taken to write the test cases has reduced using the AI features. Deployment time has really been reduced. If we want to onboard some new applications, we can just quickly onboard it and quickly create the pipeline to deploy it. Even if something goes wrong while deploying it to production or any environment, the AI troubleshooting feature which Harness has really helps to analyze the logs and suggest the fixes.

Nowadays, most of the applications are containerized applications. Harness has really rich features, and ideally, it's based on the CI/CD tool. However, native integrations with tools or features that normally people use would be beneficial. For instance, Argo CD or Helm should have some direct implementation on Harness. Even though they have those AI features, if some sample pipelines or some advanced level integrations are already pre-made, that would be really great.

The licensing cost can be significant for larger teams, which should be taken into account. If we are already using some other CI/CD tools, Harness should provide a way so that we can migrate our CI/CD pipelines to Harness. Currently, if we are moving from another tool to Harness, we just have to write the pipeline from scratch. Even though we can use AI features, we still have to give a lot of effort. Harness should have some way that if we provide them our previous application pipelines, they can generate a pipeline based on top of Harness. Sometimes some advanced workflows also may require custom scripting. Those features should also be there, so that if there are some advanced workflows, Harness is intelligent enough to just create a sample pipeline according to the use case and then we can modify it according to our need.

The same concerns about the guardrails apply. If Harness can also tell us what guardrails they have for their AI features, that would be really great.

I have used Harness for a couple of years.

Harness is stable.

As Harness is a managed SaaS solution, the vendor has to maintain the scalability. If we have deployed it on-prem, we can work as it is and just scale on our need.

Customer support is really great and does really help us.

I did evaluate options such as native CI/CD cloud solutions. I used Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab, and Tecton.

The major investment which I have seen is time saved. As I already told previously, Harness has AI capabilities and we don't need to have multiple stacks. Harness comes with all the stacks inbuilt. So we don't have to look or invest our time in looking for the other tools to suffice our use case. We can use Harness as a single source of truth. The AI features that they have and with which we can rewrite the pipeline and troubleshoot issues significantly saved time.

Everything is fine with licensing and setup. However, the licensing cost is a little bit too high. If cost is something that can be looked upon, it would be really great.

I was using Jenkins and GitHub Actions. Because I am a client intrinsic company, it depends on what the client needs. According to client need, I use GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or GitLab. However, if sometimes clients do ask me my opinion, I do tell them that Harness can be explored.

Approximately seventy-five percent time was reduced in case of deployment and around sixty to sixty-five percent time was reduced while troubleshooting it.

In my case, the number of times I have used Harness, it has given me the appropriate output and appropriate suggestions. So I think the accuracy and reliability of Harness is really high.

I would really advise them to use it if they don't want multiple tech stacks and cost is not a concern. So I would really suggest others to use Harness.

Harness is a really good tool with the rich features it has, and it's really advanced nowadays. I gave this review a rating of eight out of ten.

Harness automates the CI/CD pipelines and manages applications deployments across different environments like staging, development, and production. I use it to monitor the deployments and ensure stability, so when developers push new code to the repository, Harness automatically triggers the CI pipeline, builds the application, runs tests, and prepares the deployment packages. After validation, the CD pipeline deploys the applications to the cloud environment, automating the workflow and helping us deliver faster.

Some of the best features of Harness include powerful CI/CD pipeline automation, intelligent deployment strategies, and building monitoring. The platform also supports cloud-native environments and Kubernetes deployments, making pipeline management easier, and its automation capabilities significantly improve speed and reliability.

Harness improved deployment reliability by automating the continuous delivery pipelines and adding building verification checks, so deployments are automated and verified using performance metrics, and the platform also saved time by reducing manual operational tasks.

It has saved time; previously I needed many employees to handle deployments, but now the number of employees has reduced and the speed has increased, which is one of the good benefits.

One improvement I see for Harness is simplifying the configuration process for smaller teams or startups, as the platform offers powerful features that new users may require some time to understand. Improved documentation and onboarding tutorials would help accelerate adoption.

The analytics dashboard could be enhanced to provide deeper insights into pipeline performance.

The user interface could be improved.

I have been using Harness for several months while working in CICD and deployment automation.

Harness is stable.

It is scalable.

Customer support is good.

I appreciate that Harness provides good visibility into pipeline execution and deployment status, and I appreciate how it simplifies the complex CI/CD workflows. Its automation features help reduce human errors during releases.

The pricing is good, but it can be reduced if there is a bigger team, and it should have a good plan.

Using Harness, I now need fewer employees.

Harness is good to use; I have to look after the deployments as well. I give this review a rating of 9.

In Harness, we are basically using Canary type deployments. We have applications, web applications, and web servers. Whenever we get the WAR file with 50 servers in a load balancer, Harness will deploy on the first server by automatically taking it out from the load balancer, deploying the latest JAR file, testing it at the back end, and giving us the result. Then our developer will test it from their end, and if both results are satisfying, they will run the test cases.

If both results are satisfying, then we proceed with the first half. The first server that is deployed will move back to the load balancer, and servers two through twenty-five will come out of it, deploy, test, and go back. It is all automatic. We just need to click proceed. Everything in Harness is configured and runs smoothly.

For CI/CD automation, I am using Harness only for continuous delivery, not the CI part. Harness takes care of maintaining compliance with security measures. We have dedicated IAM in AWS, with secrets and access. Harness itself will be in our private network, and we have dedicated user ID and credentials for each user.

For deployment, we are using Git for different projects. Through Git Bash, whatever changes we make locally, we push them to our Bitbucket. We have configured Git with the Bitbucket repository, and through Bitbucket, we try to merge everything. Once merged, the Jenkins pipeline gets triggered automatically. We check the Jenkins pipeline output to see whether the application is deployed successfully. We are also using Jenkins with Harness.

The best features in Harness are its user-friendliness and setup configuration. While the initial configuration can be difficult to configure the thresholds, check the artifactory, fetch the latest releases from the artifactory, and link everything in Harness, once completed, the configuration for any new application setup becomes easy. A fresher can also use it.

The main feature is that it asks for approval before proceeding ahead. It requires two approvals, asking 'Are you sure?' We have to manually enter 'approved' and then click on the approve button before it will proceed with the next step. This is important because sometimes, in a hurry, mistakes can be made by clicking approve multiple times, so this confirmation process is beneficial.

Harness setup and configurations could be made easier to configure, which would be helpful.

I have been working with Harness for these five to six years.

We have rarely faced issues with Harness tech support. We encountered one issue where the pipelines were unable to trigger, but they notified us from Harness itself that there was some downtime and they were trying to fix it. During their downtime, we do not use Harness and do not schedule any deployments.

Harness is fulfilling my expectations regarding the scalability aspect.

We have rarely faced issues with Harness tech support. When we encountered one issue where the pipelines were unable to trigger, they notified us that there was some downtime and they were working to fix it. During their downtime, we do not schedule any deployments.

Positive

It has different modules, and the working principle is quite different. We cannot compare as Harness is totally the continuous delivery tool, and Git is for the developer side.

I do not have any information about whether we purchased Harness through AWS Marketplace or from the vendor, as it is provided to us by our client.

I would rate Harness as a product and solution a nine. It works well for me.

I have not worked on the pricing, setup cost, or licensing cost of Harness, so I have no thoughts on the pricing aspect.

I cannot comment on third-party tools because we are not using any third party currently.

I am working with the cloud version with AWS and Harness.

I would recommend Harness as a solution to others if they are using infrastructure where load balancers and target groups are in the picture. Harness is very reliable. We can also deploy Kubernetes applications to Harness itself. In Kubernetes, compared to EC2, whenever we deploy the latest JAR file on EC2, we have to reboot the server for the latest change to get updated. In Kubernetes, whenever we deploy, we have to delete the pods, and new pods will come into picture with the latest update.

Harness takes care of it; whenever we deploy Kubernetes-based microservices applications, it will terminate the pods and spin up new pods with the latest version. The same Canary process is followed.

For my requirement, I am satisfied with what they are providing us in terms of features functionality. I rate Harness 9 out of 10.

I use Harness for multiple things, such as the CI/CD process, feature flag management, security testing, and infrastructure provisioning. The primary use case is the CI/CD and deployment along with feature flag management.

In my day-to-day work, when multiple developers are collaborating on a single project and I commit my changes and raise a pull request for the main branch, the CI/CD process starts automatically after my code gets merged. It builds the code automatically and deploys it on a cloud provider of my choice, such as GCP, Azure, or AWS, after proper configuration. This allows for automated deployment across various environments, including dev, prod, QA, and staging. Additionally, deployment approvals can be sought for prod deployment. If I need to roll back, Harness offers a rollback strategy and shows all the steps in the pipeline, enabling me to directly restart any failed step. Harness also generates alerts for any deployment failures. Regarding deployment strategies, it enables options such as blue-green deployment, canary deployment, rolling deployment, and alpha-beta testing deployments. For feature flags, I can hide a new feature in our application, which can be activated by simply changing the flag value in Harness without needing to redeploy, which is particularly useful for timed events such as sales.

The best features that Harness offers include the CI/CD, continuous integration, continuous deployment, deployment strategies, cost management dashboard, and feature flag management, which I consider the top three because they significantly reduce human effort and deployment time while improving release confidence. If we have a release on a Friday, we can easily roll back in case of failure.

CI/CD and feature flag management are the two features that have had the biggest impact on our team, with CI/CD being the primary one.

Harness positively impacts our organization by reducing deployment time, improving release confidence, and lowering operational overhead during deployment. It fosters better collaboration between development and operational teams, enabling faster incident recovery. For instance, in case of a production incident, we can revert the current build and deploy the last stable version easily.

The initial setup can be complex and time-consuming, and the advanced features may require some learning time due to a steep learning curve. Additionally, the pricing may be high for smaller organizations, which could present a challenge.

I have been using Harness for around four point five years.

Harness is quite stable.

The customer support is excellent. There was an instance when I faced issues with third-party plugins, and after raising a support ticket, they responded in a few hours with a documentation link that resolved my issue. I would rate customer support a ten out of ten.

I have previously used multiple solutions such as GitLab, Jenkins, and GitHub Actions. One feature that I did not find in those other solutions is feature management. While everyone provides CI/CD, Harness excels in feature management, which is a very good feature.

The setup time for Harness takes quite a long time, but I do not think the pricing is excessive.

I have seen a return on investment primarily through time saved and reduced incident recovery time.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing Harness, as it was already in use at the company when I joined.

My advice for others considering Harness is that if you are a large organization, you should definitely go for it. However, if you are a smaller organization, it may be better to use free solutions such as Jenkins or GitLab that provide similar functionalities. I would rate this review an eight out of ten.

Harness helps us build a pipeline with containerized steps that isolates virtual machines, reduces DevOps-based drifts, and improves our process by integrating several security testing-related steps in the pipeline. Beyond that, it helps us remain regulatory and compliance adherent.

A specific example of how I use Harness for security testing or compliance in my pipeline involves the audits and certifications that our institution undergoes, such as SOC 2 and SOC 2 Type 2 certifications, as well as ISO 20001 certification needed for regulatory compliance in certain specific geographies where we operate. Harness comes in because it is compliant with these international regulations, and other larger institutions also use Harness for the same reason.

Harness offers several best features that I have worked with, including an intelligent caching system for dependencies and artifact building that allows for extremely short build times without extra bash scripting, a pipeline as code visual editor, and Harness Cloud along with small-lived virtual machines that we can run on Kubernetes.

The intelligent caching system has impacted my build times significantly by auto-caching dependencies and allowing smaller ephemeral runs to shorten build times without any need for detailed scripting, which has made a noticeable difference.

I would add that Harness has dedicated support for unit tests based on my experience, and this support is not restricted to only Java-based tests. I have seen support for Java tests, Scala, Ruby, and Kotlin, which helps us prevent flaky test management patterns.

Harness has positively impacted my organization as several teams have already migrated to it, and some are in the process of moving. It has reduced the dependency on one specific platform and has made it faster, with shortened build times and much faster deployments.

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. Additionally, there is a learning curve, as Harness is not currently an industry top-recommended solution, especially for teams coming from a Jenkins background.

For smaller teams, having features similar to GitHub Actions could be implemented by Harness, as this could really help the smaller teams who are moving to it.

I have been using Harness for three years now.

Harness is completely stable, and we are using it in production without facing any stability issues at all.

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, so I am satisfied with the scalability.

We have a direct line of enterprise support from Harness, and we have not faced any customer support issues, with tickets resolved in less than a four-day SLA.

Negative

We were using Jenkins before switching to Harness, as there was a lot of dependency, slowness, and build stability issues in Jenkins.

I cannot provide data on how much time has been reduced, but I believe the efficiency improvement is more than a twenty to thirty percent increase compared to Jenkins.

Before choosing Harness, we evaluated GitHub, GitHub Actions, GitHub CI, and CircleCI, in addition to Jenkins which we originally used.

My advice for others looking into using Harness is to perform a trade-off analysis between GitHub Actions, GitHub CI, CircleCI, and conduct a cost analysis. Harness is still new to the market and is cheaper, but Jenkins is completely open source and requires hosting, while Harness provides enterprise support for us to work with. Pros and cons need to be evaluated before adopting Harness. I am very happy with my current usage of Harness and would rate this review an eight out of ten.

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.

Harness integrates all functions like execution pipelines, environment checks, and log monitoring in one place, making it convenient. It allows monitoring of deployment status and directs me to logs, making it easy to find bugs, saving us a lot of time.

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.

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

I used it for about a year, but the last time I used it was six months ago.

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

When I integrated Harness to more than 20 applications in one place, it becomes less stable. Adding more services decreases stability.

I mainly get assistance from within my company, not directly from Harness' technical team.

Neutral

Previously, I used uDeploy from IBM. We migrated from uDeploy to Harness due to an update in our company software, transitioning from TeamCity and uDeploy to Tekton and Harness. Harness is more user-friendly with a lower learning curve.

The initial setup was easy to do. I just needed to add a YAML file to my applications and get management approval.

I was in charge of implementing our company's Lightspeed integration with Harness and Tekton.

With Harness, the release process decreased from three or four hours to one or two hours, making deployments much quicker.

I would recommend Harness as it's better than uDeploy in terms of ease of use and functionality. It supports multiple pipelines, multiple environments, different service configurations, and has a user-friendly dashboard.

I's rate the solution eight out of ten. 

Neutral

My main use case for Harness is to create pipelines, deploy applications, and manage security pipelines.

I use Harness to deploy applications to EC2 instances and Kubernetes instances, and I created pipelines for building an application, deploying an application, running security scans on repositories, syncing scans, and many more. I even used running automation tests on Harness pipelines.

The best features Harness offers, in my opinion, are the ability to create pipelines with YAML files and the Terraform codes. It is easy to manage, easy to scale up, and easy to create multiple stages. It interacts with a lot of third-party applications. We use Terraform everywhere, so using Terraform to create pipelines makes our job easier.

Harness has impacted my organization positively; we use Harness in most of all deployments, so it is uniform. When I say it is uniform, it has helped us save time, reduce errors, and make collaboration easier, with the AI integrations helping us to create tests faster, trigger tests faster, and finish tests faster while keeping logs.

There are some UI components that can be improved. The needed UI improvements include more graphs, more history, the ability to create pipelines through the UI, and more interactions, with UI components being more standardized.

I have been using Harness for two years.

Harness is stable.

Harness can be scaled very fast.

I used Concourse and Bamboo before switching to Harness.

My advice for others looking into using Harness is to use AI capabilities, create pipelines, and then use it to deploy. Harness is a good tool. I would rate this review a nine out of ten.

We use Harness as a deployment tool. It allows us to define environments like OpenShift or Kubernetes or Linux servers. 

It automates the pipeline system where users can trigger with the master branch. We use Tekton to run without any manual interaction. Once the build is done, it stores artifacts in JFrog, and Harness detects them automatically and executes deployment.

Harness has been much faster and user-friendly for the end user for deployment purposes. It allows us to do changes in the build stage during deployment, making processes more efficient. 

Harness also allows for modifications at the YAML level, which is beneficial for our pipeline and deployment processes.

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

It facilitates deployment by allowing a user to push their code into GitHub or Bitbucket and have it deployed without manual management intervention.

Even with automation, there's a requirement for manual change requests for approvals. If this is corrected, we could have a totally automated pipeline. Otherwise, we need to use GitLab or GitOps to trigger automatically with every commit.

I have been working with Harness for four to five months.

Harness is stable. There is no high latency or deployment delay, and it has proven to be reliable.

Currently, we are scaling up the pipelines with Harness, which provides functionality to achieve this without any significant issues.

There is a dedicated team within the organization to handle incidents and issues with Harness, so we don't need to rely on external support much.

Positive

We were previously using a different tool for deployments which had its limitations. Now, we use Tekton for continuous integration and Harness for deployment.

There were no significant challenges with the initial setup. We had a dedicated team for the implementation and were able to get support when needed.

For the implementation, there was a dedicated team handling Harness, which made the process streamlined.

Harness offers a user-friendly deployment experience with faster processes compared to the previous tools we were using.

I do not have information on the pricing, setup cost, and licensing as I am working for a client, and it is handled at the organizational level.

We have evaluated Jenkins and Tekton for continuous integration, yet Harness is used for deployment.

I recommend Harness to other users. As part of the engineering team, my role includes certifying products for applications, and Harness has proven suitable for our needs. I suggest adopting it based on usage requirements.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.