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GitHub Actions 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

GitHub Actions
Ranking in Build Automation
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.4
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 GitHub Actions is 8.7%, down from 10.4% 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
ProductMarket Share (%)
GitHub Actions8.7%
Harness5.8%
Other85.5%
Build Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Bharadwaj Deepak Mohapatra - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Engineer at ENTERPRISE SYSTEM SOLUTIONS LIMITED
Has supported repository management and demonstrates potential in workflow flexibility
While GitHub Actions offers a range of functionalities, it is newer compared to more established tools such as Jenkins and Azure DevOps. There is still room for improvement, especially in areas concerning deeper capabilities akin to those provided by Jenkins and Azure DevOps. Given the evolving nature of technology, there are potential improvements GitHub Actions can focus on, including enhancing support and reliability to match its competitors.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is user-friendly, with clear and organized processes, making it easy to navigate and work with."
"GitHub Actions is valuable for its ease of use and integration."
"The solution has saved us approximately 20% in terms of efficiency and productivity."
"We can trigger files manually or automate processes."
"The most valuable feature of GitHub Actions is the ability to automate various tasks, such as backups and deployments, to ease the development workflow."
"GitHub Actions is a beautiful tool that integrates smoothly with all major tools, reducing CI/CD work by 30% to 40%."
"It offers numerous built-in features for pipeline management, release management, and even work item tracking on boards, which makes it a versatile tool that seamlessly integrates with hardware and facilitates optimization."
"Creating workflows in YAML format is straightforward and easy to comprehend. This includes both understanding and writing workflows. Additionally, the downloading aspect for third-party instances can also be easily done. It's worth noting that vulnerability analysis and similar tasks should be part of our automation through data workflows. Furthermore, we can break down our processes step by step, starting from building, then moving on to analysis, testing, and finally deploying in production and the clear environment. All of these tasks can be efficiently managed within this platform."
"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."
"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."
"Harness starts integrating with organizations, making everything automated without the need for manual interruption."
"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."
"The features of Harness are valuable, supporting rolling deployments, basic deployments, and blue-green deployments with zero downtime."
 

Cons

"The minor drawback of GitHub Actions is the management of the dashboard and pipeline runs, which needs improvement. The dashboard for running pipelines could be better."
"Switching between hosted and self-hosted agents can be a bit complex, as self-hosted agents need to be provisioned in platforms like Azure or AWS."
"The solution's integration capabilities and UI are areas of concern where improvement is required to make the product more user-friendly."
"We still use Jenkins for some tasks, which suggests there may be areas for improvement in GitHub Actions."
"GitHub sometimes makes it difficult to debug actions."
"The main improvement would be to add support for more programming languages and frameworks."
"The reporting capabilities are somewhat limited."
"The UI could be better."
"I prefer the previous less compact UI version of Harness, which showed more details on the screen."
"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."
"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."
"There's also room for improvement in debugging pipeline issues, which can sometimes become complex."
"Infrastructure as code or pipeline as code is something that Harness severely lacks."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"For our basic usage, we didn't have to pay."
"The tool's price is okay and reasonable."
"It's low-priced. Not high, but definitely low."
"Price-wise, GitHub Actions is okay. If I want to use the product's advanced features, then I need to pay the licensing charges for the solution."
"It is free and open platform, so I would rate it 1 out of 10."
"The cost for GitHub Actions may be around $45 dollars per user."
"Regarding cost, as an enterprise, we negotiate our license and expenses, so I can't provide a specific rating for that."
"The product is slightly more expensive than some alternatives."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
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 Business9
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Large Enterprise7
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about GitHub Actions?
I have optimized job execution time by running test scripts in parallel and creating multiple pipelines; we've significantly reduced execution times. What could take 50 minutes can be cut down to j...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for GitHub Actions?
I would rate pricing a seven, which leans toward the expensive side. However, there is still value for money, and that's why we continue using it.
What needs improvement with GitHub Actions?
While GitHub Actions offers a range of functionalities, it is newer compared to more established tools such as Jenkins and Azure DevOps. There is still room for improvement, especially in areas con...
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

No data available
Armory
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Linedata, Openbank, Home Depot, Advanced
Find out what your peers are saying about GitHub Actions vs. Harness and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.