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Harness CI vs. CircleCI 

Summary:

Harness provides CI/CD as a part of a complete platform to streamline, simplify, and reduce the number of tools needed for application delivery. CircleCI is a point solution catered mainly to CI with immature CD capabilities that will require more tools to integrate within the tech stack to achieve the same results. While providing a huge range of infrastructure options and integrations, CircleCI users suffer from stability issues, lack of pricing transparency, and lack of governance.

Pricing:

We often hear CircleCI pricing is too complex and can introduce hidden costs to unlock premium features required to get the expected performance and build speeds.
Company pays for credits. Credits then pay for users, usage, and features – three separate variables to keep in mind to make proper estimates of your costs. This makes credits very difficult to calculate – by number of users, the machine size, the concurrency amount, whether Docker Layer Caching is used, if there is network transfer occurring (CD), and if there is Network Storage (Caching) in play.
CircleCI can be much more expensive than expected. Harness CI provides transparent pricing for both SaaS and Self-Managed plans for companies of any size, along with an open source version that’s free available to download from Drone.io. 

Ease of Use:

CircleCI is fairly easy to adopt and also offers customizable/flexible build environments. However, jobs can take a long time and can be buggy if modified, and this may require users to cancel the workflow and restart it. CircleCI also struggles with uptime and reliability. Lastly, there’s mixed feedback on the UI itself, with users calling it frustrating, complex, and confusing. 
Harness CI is built upon four pillars that enable engineers to build and test code quickly and accurately: simple, scalable, open, and secure. You can onboard under five minutes, scale resources on demand, and have all plugins run in containers on their latest version. This means less hours spent by engineers maintaining the tool and more time on what matters: delivering value to end users.

Governance:

CircleCI has limited RBAC capabilities (less granular and customizable). CirlceCI leverages permissions that require users to rely on the SCM that its attached. This process lacks policy as code driven by OPA, and lacks native secrets management without relying on integrations.
Harness provides enterprise governance controls with OPA based policy as code, full audit trails, templates to enforce guardrails, and fine-grained/customizable RBAC for the entire SDLC. 

Build Velocity:

CircleCI’s build speed requires premium features to achieve the promised performance.
Harness runs builds 4x faster than every CI tool on the market via proprietary technologies like Test Intelligence, Cache Intelligence, and Hosted Builds. Test Intelligence uses ML to identify which tests are required, splits them, and then runs them concurrently. Cache Intelligence greatly reduces execution times by automatically caching well known directories for Java & Node.js, and Hosted Builds allow you to deploy any application on Windows, Linux, or Mac without worrying about maintaining and managing infrastructure.

Plugins and Integrations:

CircleCI has a large number of integrations and plugins called Orbs; however, only 150 of the 2500 CircleCI integrations are used by more than 25 organizations. We’ve seen how point solutions create more pain for developers by not offering a complete platform. Developers are reliant on other vendors for security, source code management, and a variety of other DevOps needs.
Harness CI is portable without scripting, added maintenance, and is actively growing its number of integrations as a part of an already comprehensive software delivery platform. 

Scalability:

There’s room for improvement when it comes to scalability with CircleCI – ironic considering “speed and scale” are two of their selling points. We have learned that, for container-based plans, jobs can get queued if there aren’t enough containers to accommodate the workload. This raises questions around scalability and load balancing. 
Harness CI makes sure scaling is never a problem with the option to run hosted builds and provides autoscaling integrations such as Amazon EC2, Digital Ocean, Google Computer, Hetzner, Open Stack, and Packet.