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Harness vs IBM Rational Build Forge 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

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)
IBM Rational Build Forge
Ranking in Build Automation
23rd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Harness is 5.8%, up from 5.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Rational Build Forge is 1.6%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Build Automation Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Harness5.8%
IBM Rational Build Forge1.6%
Other92.6%
Build Automation
 

Featured Reviews

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.
it_user1330545 - PeerSpot reviewer
CRM Program Release Manager at Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center
Great reporting features and very functional
The solution could be more user friendly. Trying to train somebody on it can be difficult. If you're in this field, you kind of learn the tools, but trying to show a PM how to find report sheets to pull data was difficult. I had to show them how to write the queries and pull the data that they needed. It's not a layman's solution. If you're working with a programmer or with an architect, you won't have issues trying to relay how to utilize the tool. It was for those who cut the checks where there were problems enabling them to pull the data they required. I guess the answer is DevOps, but it depends on your environment. Just being able to sign into dashboards and get accurate results was my biggest thing with my PMs on my projects. They like charts and pie graphs, the ability to see things at a glance data where they could make decisions on the fly.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Harness integrates all functions like execution pipelines, environment checks, and log monitoring in one place, making it convenient."
"It's a highly customizable DevOps tool."
"The features of Harness are valuable, supporting rolling deployments, basic deployments, and blue-green deployments with zero downtime."
"Everything in Harness is configured and runs smoothly."
"Harness integrates all functions like execution pipelines, environment checks, and log monitoring in one place."
"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."
"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%."
"Very good reporting features."
"All features are useful. Our customer doesn't have any complaints about the tool. It works pretty well for what they want and what they need to do."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"Its logging can be improved. When something goes wrong, it is not always very easy to find the problem. It is hard to identify whether the problem is because of low memory in the server or some configuration in Rational Build Forge. The error logs are not very detailed, and they should provide more information. It should also have more integration with third-party tools. It would be great to have more integration with third-party tools."
"Not user friendly for the layman."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
29%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Retailer
5%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Large Enterprise7
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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 ...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Armory
Rational Build Forge
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Linedata, Openbank, Home Depot, Advanced
Cars.com
Find out what your peers are saying about Harness vs. IBM Rational Build Forge and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.