Detailed Feature Comparison

Harness DevOps tools Vs. Azure DevOps

Open source vs. Open core:

Azure DevOps is not an open-source product. They do have a free plan for individuals/organizations that plan on using the product for open-source projects, but that’s it. As GitHub is entrenched with open-source and they were acquired by Microsoft, we did want to mention them as there is some uncertainty about product direction. The long and short of it is that Microsoft has acknowledged GitHub and Azure DevOps are competing products and they can’t go on forever with both. They will be merging them into one product, but that’s still a long way away. And sadly, it probably won’t be open-source! Now, onto Drone: when Harness acquired Drone, it committed to keeping it open-source forever. Harness recently reaffirmed its investment in the open-source solution with a massive release where a sleeker interface, new visual pipeline builder, governance and security features, and real-time debugging tools were added. While this feature-rich version is free, there is also a paid version of Drone that provides access to enterprise support and more integrations and features yet. Additional features include secrets management options, autoscaling, custom plugins, and more.

Self-Service (Simple):

Azure DevOps provides flexibility and quite customizable pipelines, though the initial setup could be more streamlined, and it does have quite a steep learning curve. Migrating from another platform can be very complicated if trying to replicate your old setup exactly. Azure DevOps refers to their plugins as extensions, and the size of their marketplace rivals Jenkins’ – in other words, their extension store does provide a ton of extensibility to the platform. According to user reviews, Azure DevOps can be quite buggy and features are added/removed without customer input. In contrast, Drone offers an easy “get started” experience where you can be up and running in 5 minutes. Drone also benefits from roughly 150 containerized plugins, profoundly extending the functionality of the tool. Drone scales on demand. All of this means less person-hours spent by engineers maintaining the tool or waiting for slowness/downtime to resolve, and more time on what matters: getting that code to artifact.

GitOps:

When it comes to GitOps, Azure DevOps provides full GitOps for pipelines, but not for releases. Harness provides full GitOps capabilities – anytime, anywhere.

Secrets Management:

Understandably, Azure DevOps leverages Azure Key Vault natively as secrets manager. However, if Azure Key Vault isn’t your cup of tea, other providers may be used by employing an extension. Drone offers encryption on its open-source version. Meanwhile, the enterprise version offers these alternatives: encrypted, native, or external, through third-party providers such as AWS Secret Manager, Kubernetes Secrets, and HashiCorp Vault. No matter how you want your secrets to be handled, Drone can rise to the occasion.

Pricing:

Azure DevOps has two pricing models since it offers both a SaaS and On-Premise version. It adds another layer of complexity by having you choose another path on SaaS: by individual service or user licenses. User licenses obviously will be charged per user per month (and include more than 1 service), while subscribing to only an individual service, such as Azure Pipelines (their CI/CD tool) will be charged based on parallel jobs. Visit their pricing page for a fully-detailed view. Drone offers an open-source version that is free, and while the enterprise (paid) version does provide an arguably more robust product, the free version is already quite feature-rich and will suffice for many use cases. Download Drone now. To familiarize yourself with enterprise pricing, please contact sales.

*Please note: Our competitors, just like us, release updates to their products on a regular cadence. We keep these pages updated to the best of our ability, but there are bound to be discrepancies. For the most up-to-date information on competitor features, browsing the competitor’s new release pages and communities are your best bet.

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