GoCD vs Harness comparison

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GoCD

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

GoCD and Harness are competing products in the continuous delivery domain. Harness gains an edge with its advanced features, making its higher cost justifiable for organizations seeking comprehensive solutions.

Features: GoCD allows swift feedback loops and efficient parallel execution with its powerful pipeline modeling, flexibility, and straightforward configurations. Harness simplifies continuous delivery through AI-driven solutions, superior integration capabilities, and automating complex tasks.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: GoCD’s deployment process is rapid and its open-source nature ensures community support. Harness offers seamless cloud-based deployment with comprehensive onboarding and 24/7 support.

Pricing and ROI: GoCD presents low setup costs due to its open-source platform, appealing to budget-conscious projects. Harness operates on a subscription model with higher initial expenses but promises higher ROI through automation efficiency and minimized downtimes.

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

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GoCD vs. Harness

December 2025

Helped 881,082 peers since 2012

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

GoCD

Ranking in Build Automation

17th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (18th), Release Automation (13th)

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 GoCD is 2.1%, up from 1.5% 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
Product	Market Share (%)
Harness	5.8%
GoCD	2.1%
Other	92.1%

Build Automation

Featured Reviews

RajeshReddy

Dev Ops Engineer at Infosys

The UI is colorful, but the user experience must be improved

We can see all the pipelines with a simple search. The UI is colorful. The user experience is very rich. The product is very easy to learn if we know a bit of the basics. If we have someone to show us how to use it, it is very easy.

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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

"The UI is colorful."

"GoCD's open-source nature is valuable."

"The most notable aspect is its user interface, which we find to be user-friendly and straightforward for deploying and comprehending pipelines. We have the ability to create multiple pipelines, and in addition to that, the resource consumption is impressive."

"Permission separations mean that we can grant limited permissions for each team or team member."

"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."

"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."

"It's a highly customizable DevOps tool."

"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."

"The features of Harness are valuable, supporting rolling deployments, basic deployments, and blue-green deployments with zero downtime."

Cons

"The aspect that requires attention is the user management component. When integrating with BitLabs and authenticating through GitLab, there are specific features we desire. One important feature is the ability to import users directly from GitLab, along with their respective designations, and assign appropriate privileges based on that information. Allocating different privileges to users is a time-consuming process for us."

"It is difficult to assign different access levels because it relies on separate keys for developer and admin access, which could be simplified."

"The tool must be more user-friendly."

"The documentation really should be improved by including real examples and more setup cases."

"Infrastructure as code or pipeline as code is something that Harness severely lacks."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is an open-source solution and it is inexpensive."

"It's an open-source and free tool."

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

11%

University

Financial Services Firm

Educational Organization

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	4
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	3

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Large Enterprise	7

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about GoCD?

The UI is colorful.

What needs improvement with GoCD?

One area of product improvement is the access control system. It is difficult to assign different access levels because it relies on separate keys for developer and admin access, which could be sim...

What is your primary use case for GoCD?

The solution helps us deploy microservices across multiple environments.

What do you like most about Harness?

It's a highly customizable DevOps tool.

What needs improvement with Harness?

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 ...

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Compared 17% of the time

Jenkins vs Harness

Compared 9% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

Tekton vs Harness

Compared 7% of the time

GitLab vs Harness

Compared 7% of the time

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Product Reports

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites

December 2025

Download GoCD product report

Download Harness product report

January 2026

Also Known As

Adaptive ALM, Thoughtworks Go

Armory

Overview

GoCD is an open source continuous delivery server created by ThoughtWorks. GoCD offers businesses a first-class build and deployment engine for complete control and visibility. It was designed for continuous delivery and the concepts essential to this practice are built in at the core.

Thoughtworks

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.

Sample Customers

Ancestry.com, Barclay Card, AutoTrader, BT Financial Group, Gamesys, Nike, Vodafone, Haufe Lexware, Medidata, Hoovers

Linedata, Openbank, Home Depot, Advanced