Buildkite vs Harness comparison

Buildkite and Harness are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Buildkite is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.2, while Harness is ranked #7 with an average rating of 7.7. Buildkite holds a 2.8% mindshare in BA, compared to Harness’s 5.8% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of Buildkite users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Harness users who would recommend it.

Buildkite

Read 14 Buildkite reviews

710 Views
696 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Harness

Read 7 Harness reviews

2,588 Views
1,863 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Buildkite

Harness

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

Harness and Buildkite are competing products in continuous integration and delivery. Data comparisons suggest Buildkite holds a slight edge in flexibility and scalability, while Harness is favored for its intuitive automation capabilities.

Features: Harness is known for automated deployment pipelines, centralized logging, and support for complex workflows. Buildkite offers customizable pipelines, superior control over build environments, and flexibility.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Harness provides a cloud-based deployment model, simplifying setup with proactive customer support. Buildkite uses a hybrid model, allowing infrastructure control but requiring more technical setup. Its service emphasizes responsiveness, though it might need more technical assistance.

Pricing and ROI: Harness offers a flexible pricing model focused on cost-effective automation, leading to a favorable ROI by reducing time and resources in manual processes. Buildkite's competitive pricing is favored by larger enterprises who prioritize control and customization, with potential for higher initial costs offset by tailored deployments.

To learn more, read our detailed Buildkite vs. Harness Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite vs. Harness

December 2025

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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

Buildkite

Ranking in Build Automation

8th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

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

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 Buildkite is 2.8%, up from 0.4% 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
Product	Market Share (%)
Harness	5.8%
Buildkite	2.8%
Other	91.4%

Build Automation

Featured Reviews

Raed I.Habib

Senior DevOps Engineer at a newspaper with 5,001-10,000 employees

Easy-to-use and provides good documentation for managing agents

Buildkite has been pushing a lot of effort toward the plugin marketplace and plugin users, especially with the Kubernetes plugin that supports the scalability of agents. The flexibility of some plugins is somewhat limited. In the past, I used to modify the plugins according to my needs. Now, plugins support some sort of configuration or reconfiguration. I would love to see some features added in that direction and the plugin's use. I would like to see some improvements in the hooks implementation. The hooks are amazing and give me a lot of extra flexibility in many of the pipelines, but they're still limited in some areas.

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reviewer2787357

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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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is a stable solution."

"Buildkite's UI is particularly intuitive, making it simple to add steps to your pipeline. It also provides detailed logging."

"Buildkite makes it easier to conduct deployment. When I merge a PR in Buildkite, it automatically starts the deployment process. It used to be challenging to shift code from the development branch to the testing branch because I had to follow up with multiple developers. Previously, I was dependent on the DevOps team and developers to handle deployments, but now it allows me to deploy the solutions myself.This has made it much easier for me to handle both non-production and production environments."

"The tool's flexibility with pipelines gave us a lot of advantages, especially when managing a huge amount of microservices."

"You don't have to set up an agent in Buildkite like in Jenkins."

"They have great plugins, scalability, UI, and pipeline options. They also offer webhooks that allow integration with custom setups to send events dynamically."

"If you join our team, it's very easy to learn Buildkite. We have our own boilerplate, so you can just clone it and add your configuration steps. Plus, we have documentation available to guide you through the process."

"The product's initial setup phase was easy."

More Buildkite pros

"It's a highly customizable DevOps tool."

"Harness integrates all functions like execution pipelines, environment checks, and log monitoring in one place."

"Everything in Harness is configured and runs smoothly."

"Harness integrates all functions like execution pipelines, environment checks, and log monitoring in one place, making it convenient."

"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."

"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%."

"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."

Cons

"BuildKite should follow some providers like GitHub Actions. They can offer a shared agent or cloud agent."

"Compared to market leaders like Azure DevOps and Jenkins, Buildkite's community is smaller, but they do have some documentation."

"Most of our projects involve both front-end and back-end development. We write the code and then create a file to set up our process, including specifying the tests we want to run. Before deploying to production, we need to install and configure certain things. We need something like Docker Pro, but I'm unsure about that. I'm familiar with the steps for using Buildkite for this process. We start by defining which tests to run."

"The way Buildkite represents workflows can be challenging. It uses Directed Acyclic Graphs, and there's a trade-off between abstraction and understanding what goes wrong when something fails. When a layer of jobs breaks down, it can be difficult to identify the issue at first glance. Additionally, logging can be cumbersome. I prefer GitHub Workflows."

"It gets very complex if you want the tool to scale automatically."

"My company has had problems with the tool's parallel running and execution time. The testing framework also has some limitations. The tool cannot do everything."

"Since we were using Buildkite for the first time, we had a lot of difficulty understanding how it worked. We didn't find any documentation from third parties; only Buildkite provided documentation. As a result, we faced a steep learning curve. After some time, it became much easier to use. Initially, understanding certain features, like the R integration, was challenging."

"I would like to see some improvements in the hooks implementation."

More Buildkite cons

"When deploying multiple components to multiple environments, like production and BCP, failures sometimes occur. Improvements are needed when deploying one component to one environment."

"There's also room for improvement in debugging pipeline issues, which can sometimes become complex."

"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."

"The first point for improvement is the steep learning curve, where concepts such as services, environment, pipelines, and templates take time to understand."

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

"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."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's per-user pricing model suits huge enterprises but is expensive for small to medium businesses."

"The self-hosted option is pretty cheap."

"We used the solution’s free version."

"Buildkite is known to be cheaper than GitHub Workflows, which is considered a standard in the industry. It can be cost-effective, especially for organizations that heavily utilize Docker and containerization, because every code change triggers a new build. Its integration with AWS, particularly with ECR, and its caching capabilities with layers are powerful features."

"For a business plan, it was 19 USD per month per user."

"I don't think the tool is expensive."

"I find Buildkite cost-effective as it has definitely increased my productivity, especially on the deployment side. It saved a lot of my time and improved data management because I can handle different environments myself now."

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

17%

Newspaper

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

29%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Large Enterprise	7

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Buildkite?

One area that needs improvement in Buildkite is the requirement for rework of the code. There can be syntax errors when running the Buildkite pipeline, especially if someone has made manual changes...

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What is your primary use case for Buildkite?

I use Buildkite for deployment tasks related to building AMI images and deploying routing profile queues into Amazon Connect. This involves using Buildkite in conjunction with GitHub. We create fil...

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What advice do you have for others considering Buildkite?

With two years of experience on Buildkite, I would recommend it to others due to its manageable pipeline and the support team available for big issues. I am satisfied with it, rating its stability ...

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What do you like most about Harness?

It's a highly customizable DevOps tool.

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What needs improvement with Harness?

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

Comparisons

GitHub Actions vs Buildkite

Compared 23% of the time

GitLab vs Buildkite

Compared 12% of the time

Tekton vs Buildkite

Compared 11% of the time

Nx vs Buildkite

Compared 9% of the time

CircleCI vs Buildkite

Compared 7% of the time

More Buildkite Competitors

GitHub Actions vs Harness

Compared 17% of the time

Jenkins vs Harness

Compared 9% of the time

TeamCity vs Harness

Compared 7% of the time

Tekton vs Harness

Compared 7% of the time

LaunchDarkly vs Harness

Compared 4% of the time

More Harness Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite

January 2026

Download Buildkite product report

Buyer's Guide

Harness

January 2026

Download Harness product report

Also Known As

No data available

Armory

Overview

Buildkite is a powerful CI/CD tool praised for its scalability and flexibility in automating and managing complex workflows across multiple platforms. Its integration capabilities with various systems and supports for secure, customizable environments enhance development efficiency and data privacy. The feedback highlights significant boosts in productivity and operational cost reduction, making Buildkite a strategic asset for businesses aiming to streamline development tasks and align with organizational goals.

Buildkite

Harness offers a comprehensive toolset for automating deployment processes and enhancing software update efficiency. It's lauded for its CI/CD capabilities, feature flagging, and real-time deployment monitoring. Key features include an intuitive UI, secret management, and robust rollback functionalities, all contributing to improved productivity and reduced errors in DevOps environments.

Harness

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Linedata, Openbank, Home Depot, Advanced

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite vs. Harness

December 2025

Free Report: Buildkite vs. Harness

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