Harness can be improved by providing more clarity on the credits it issues for Harness Cloud, as it has a tiered pricing structure involving license and credit costs, which can get confusing. Additionally, there is a learning curve, as Harness is not currently an industry top-recommended solution, especially for teams coming from a Jenkins background. For smaller teams, having features similar to GitHub Actions could be implemented by Harness, as this could really help the smaller teams who are moving to it.
Site Reliability Engineer 2 at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Top 5
Jan 5, 2026
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.
Harness UI can do a lot of good things. Harness's UI should not feel very complicated. At the current stage, it feels very commercialized and compared to other platforms such as Argo CD or Jenkins, which feel much more lively and much more simple. Infrastructure as code or pipeline as code is something that Harness severely lacks. There is not a lot of good support for pipeline as code, and I often find myself not using pipeline as code the way other platforms such as GitHub Actions or Jenkins integrate pipeline as code. Pipeline as code is definitely one of the disadvantages when it comes to Harness. Additionally, the entire platform feels very commercialized, which is something that a lot of developers, especially open-source enthusiasts, might not appreciate even within the organization. One of the very important key factors I observed was that 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. There is no way to execute nested pipeline execution, which may or may not be required based on the use case, but it is definitely one of those features that I wish the platform had.
Senior Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 20
Apr 28, 2025
When deploying multiple components to multiple environments, like production and BCP, failures sometimes occur. Improvements are needed when deploying one component to one environment.
Previously, when deploying a version that had been deployed successfully before, it sometimes failed upon trying again, which seems to be an intermittent issue about stability. 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. If this is corrected, we could have a totally automated pipeline. Otherwise, we need to use GitLab or GitOps to trigger automatically with every commit.
Engineering Technical Leader - SRE (Cloud/Kubernetes-Security) at Cisco
Real User
Top 5
Apr 5, 2024
The platform's initial setup process could be simplified. Additionally, security features and capabilities for understanding vulnerabilities within the application could be enhanced directly from the tool. There's also room for improvement in debugging pipeline issues, which can sometimes become complex. Limitations regarding reconciliation features and support for certain parts of the infrastructure should also be addressed.
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 can be improved by providing more clarity on the credits it issues for Harness Cloud, as it has a tiered pricing structure involving license and credit costs, which can get confusing. Additionally, there is a learning curve, as Harness is not currently an industry top-recommended solution, especially for teams coming from a Jenkins background. For smaller teams, having features similar to GitHub Actions could be implemented by Harness, as this could really help the smaller teams who are moving to it.
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.
Harness UI can do a lot of good things. Harness's UI should not feel very complicated. At the current stage, it feels very commercialized and compared to other platforms such as Argo CD or Jenkins, which feel much more lively and much more simple. Infrastructure as code or pipeline as code is something that Harness severely lacks. There is not a lot of good support for pipeline as code, and I often find myself not using pipeline as code the way other platforms such as GitHub Actions or Jenkins integrate pipeline as code. Pipeline as code is definitely one of the disadvantages when it comes to Harness. Additionally, the entire platform feels very commercialized, which is something that a lot of developers, especially open-source enthusiasts, might not appreciate even within the organization. One of the very important key factors I observed was that 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. There is no way to execute nested pipeline execution, which may or may not be required based on the use case, but it is definitely one of those features that I wish the platform had.
Harness setup and configurations could be made easier to configure, which would be helpful.
When deploying multiple components to multiple environments, like production and BCP, failures sometimes occur. Improvements are needed when deploying one component to one environment.
Previously, when deploying a version that had been deployed successfully before, it sometimes failed upon trying again, which seems to be an intermittent issue about stability. 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. If this is corrected, we could have a totally automated pipeline. Otherwise, we need to use GitLab or GitOps to trigger automatically with every commit.
The platform's initial setup process could be simplified. Additionally, security features and capabilities for understanding vulnerabilities within the application could be enhanced directly from the tool. There's also room for improvement in debugging pipeline issues, which can sometimes become complex. Limitations regarding reconciliation features and support for certain parts of the infrastructure should also be addressed.