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AWS CodePipeline vs Harness 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
7.8
AWS CodePipeline optimizes development efficiency and resources, enhancing monitoring with expected financial returns similar to AWS Batch.
Sentiment score
9.0
Harness streamlines deployments, boosting efficiency, reducing errors, and lowering costs, validating its licensing investment through automation.
Time is saved because we now save engineering time. Before, it required two to three engineers actively monitoring production during deployments, but after starting to use Harness, there is zero or minimal manual monitoring.
Site Reliability Engineer at Granicus Inc.
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
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
7.1
AWS CodePipeline support receives mixed reviews, with faster assistance in business plans; documentation helps some manage independently.
Sentiment score
7.8
Users appreciate Harness support's responsiveness and effectiveness, praising timely incident reports, proactive notifications, and helpful communication.
Harness customer support is really helpful anytime I try to reach out; they are available to assist with any issues I am facing.
Site Reliability Engineer at Granicus Inc.
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
AWS CodePipeline is scalable and flexible, efficiently managing deployments across languages with high user satisfaction, despite Linux limitations.
Sentiment score
7.7
Harness excels in scalability, supporting extensive applications, though performance may drop with over 20 integrations in enterprise settings.
AWS CodePipeline is good for scalability, and I rate it as nine out of ten.
Head of Development at Abyss
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
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
When I integrated Harness to more than 20 applications in one place, it becomes less stable.
Software Engineer at Citi
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.4
AWS CodePipeline is highly stable and reliable, with minimal issues if correctly configured, aligning well with CI/CD expectations.
Sentiment score
7.2
Harness is stable and reliable, with minor integration issues and proactive communication during occasional downtime enhancing user experience.
I rate the stability of AWS CodePipeline as a ten out of ten because I have not experienced any issues with it.
Head of Development at Abyss
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

AWS CodePipeline users want lower costs, faster builds, enhanced multi-cloud support, better integrations, UI, customization, and improved technical documentation.
Harness needs streamlined setup, better security, improved automation, and flexible pricing to enhance efficiency and user experience.
The documentation for AWS CodePipeline is lacking and makes it difficult to find information due to its complexity.
Head of Development at Abyss
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
Flexible pricing models and more essential features in lower tiers could address this issue.
Site Reliability Engineer at Granicus Inc.
Harness setup and configurations could be made easier to configure, which would be helpful.
Senior AWS Consultant at Quantum Integrators
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise users find AWS CodePipeline cost-effective and flexible, with monthly costs typically under $5 per pipeline.
I estimated it costs around $5 monthly.
Head of Development at Abyss
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

AWS CodePipeline excels in integration, flexibility, cost-efficiency, security, and simplifies transitions with robust deployment and management tools.
Harness simplifies deployment with automation, AI-driven error handling, and intuitive design, enhancing safety, visibility, and efficiency for microservices.
It allows me to test changes in an isolated environment before deploying them to the entire user base.
Head of Development at Abyss
Meantime to recovery (MTTR) improved from 30 to 60 minutes before Harness to 5 to 10 minutes now.
Site Reliability Engineer at Granicus Inc.
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
 

Categories and Ranking

AWS CodePipeline
Ranking in Build Automation
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
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)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of AWS CodePipeline is 3.3%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Harness is 5.8%, up from 5.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Build Automation Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
AWS CodePipeline3.3%
Harness5.8%
Other90.9%
Build Automation
 

Featured Reviews

JR
Head of Development at Abyss
Employs advanced deployment strategies and manages CI/CD workflow efficiently
Blue-green deployment has been incredibly beneficial for handling complex deployments in AWS CodePipeline. It allows me to test changes in an isolated environment before deploying them to the entire user base. Additionally, the CI/CD support provided by AWS simplifies the integration process by adding YAML files to projects, enabling AWS to manage the entire CI/CD workflow.
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.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
8%
Educational Organization
7%
Financial Services Firm
29%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Retailer
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Large Enterprise7
 

Questions from the Community

Which AWS solution would you choose - CodeStar or CodePipeline?
Both AWS solutions deliver solid options, with uniquely different features. AWS CodeStar allows for quick development, building, and deployments of apps. It also provides web application and web se...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS CodePipeline?
AWS CodePipeline's pricing is reasonable, and it is not too expensive. I estimated it costs around $5 monthly. On a scale from one to ten, where one is very cheap and ten is very expensive, I would...
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 ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

CodePipeline
Armory
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Linedata, Openbank, Home Depot, Advanced
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS CodePipeline vs. Harness and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.