Harness

Continuous Integration

Harness CI is an enterprise-ready, cloud-native CI solution fully integrated as part of the Harness Software Delivery Platform that’s performant, easy to maintain, and easy to scale.

Company size

500-1000

Founded

2016

Funding

$425M

Harness is categorized as:
Continuous Integration
Continuous Delivery
Cloud Cost Management
Cloud Cost Optimization
Feature Flags
Service Reliability Management
Security Testing Orchestration
Chaos Engineering
Software Engineering Insights

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CircleCI

CircleCI is a modern continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform. CircleCI automates building, testing, and deploying software.

Company size

600+

Founded

2011

Funding

315m
Latest funding: Series F $100 million round of funding in 2021

CircleCI is categorized as:
Continuous Integration

CircleCI is a purpose-built CI/CD solution that focuses on performance and extensibility, providing a large number of Orbs, or plugins, that integrate with common DevOps tools to automate application development. With a core focus on CI, it lacks many native governance capabilities, can be expensive due to hidden costs, and has historically experienced stability issues that make Harness CI a great option for teams looking to modernize how they build, test, and deploy their applications.

Why choose Harness CI over CircleCI?

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 large number of compute and execution environments, CircleCI users suffer from security and stability issues, lack of pricing transparency, and lack of governance.

Harness CI, being a part of Harness Software Delivery Platform, has all the features that make it easy to scale for the largest organizations while empowering developers with the autonomy they need to ship the best features quickly, efficiently, reliably, and securely.

The Modern Software Delivery Platform

CircleCI's primary focus is on providing continuous integration (CI) capabilities, with less mature features for continuous deployment (CD), and it does not provide native solutions for other challenges that arise in the software delivery lifecycle. As a result, customers may need to use additional tools to address these challenges, which can lead to issues such as data fragmentation, lack of visibility across solutions, integration challenges, a steeper learning curve, overlapping functionality, and other difficulties that can make it challenging to maintain consistency throughout the development process.

Harness offers an intelligent software delivery platform that delivers a unified end to end SDLC experience, enabling businesses to increase software delivery velocity while improving reliability, governance and efficiency of their applications. With out-of-the-box enterprise capabilities such as templates, custom dashboards, Open Policy Agent (OPA) based policies, full audit trails, customizable RBAC and more, Harness provides a “single pane of glass”, governance and controls for the entire SDLC.

Up to X4 faster

CircleCI requires usage of premium features (e.g. docker layer caching, premium infrastructure) to achieve high performance.

Harness Cloud can run builds up to 4x faster than every CI tool on the market. We achieve this through a mix of proprietary technologies like Test Intelligence , Automatic Tests Splitting, Cache Intelligence and Harness Cloud, our hosted builds solution. When using Harness Cloud users can build any application on Windows, Linux, or Mac without worrying about maintaining and managing infrastructure.

Governance & Security

CircleCI has limited RBAC capabilities (less granular and customizable). CirlceCI leverages permissions that require users to rely on the SCM that is attached. This process lacks policy as code driven by Open Policy Agent (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, native support for external secrets managers, and fine-grained/customizable RBAC for the entire SDLC.

Pricing

We often hear CircleCI pricing is too complex and can introduce hidden costs to unlock premium features required to get the desired performance and build speeds.

CircleCI uses Credits to pay for usage based on number of active users, machine type and size, network and storage usage and premium features like Docker Layer Caching. This makes it difficult to predict the amount of credits you need, often making it more expensive than expected.

Harness offers a competitive and transparent pricing model suitable for companies of any size, making it easy to understand and predict costs.

What is the difference between Harness CI vs. CircleCI?

Updated

March 23, 2023

‍

Solution

Open Source Version

Free and Paid

Hosting Options

SaaS and On-Premise

GitHub Stars

26,200

1500

26,200

1500

Plugins

5000+

2500+ (called “Orbs”)

5000+

2500+ (called “Orbs”)

Declarative Pipeline Yaml

Pricing Model

Per user
Per minute for hosted builds

Per user and pipeline minute

Per user
Per minute for hosted builds

Per user and pipeline minute

Build & Test

Containerized Pipelines

Parallel Builds

Fully-Managed Builds

Test Intelligence

Manual Tests Splitting

Automatic Tests Splitting

Cache Intelligence

Config-as-Code

Pipeline Notifications

Remote Docker Layer Caching

Custom Variables

Source Code Management

GitHub

GitHub Enterprise

GitLab

GitLab On-Premise

Bitbucket Cloud

Bitbucket Server

Azure DevOps

Integrations

Drone Plugins

GitHub Actions

Bitrise Steps

Security & Governance

Secrets Management

<yes><yes>
Vault/KMS/3rd party

Policy as Code (OPA)

Native RBAC

Full Audit Trails

IP Whitelisting

Encryption at Rest

SAML

SCIM

Reporting and Metrics

DORA Metrics OOTB

Customizable Dashboards

Centralized Pipeline Visibility

Platform Support

Cloud-Native App Support

Traditional App Support

Multi-Platform

<yes><yes>
(Linux/Windows/MacOS)

Ease of Use

Self-Service (Simple)

Visual Pipeline Editor

Code Editor

*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.

Continuous Integration

VS

CircleCI

Harness Continuous Integration vs CircleCI

Continuous Integration

Company size

Founded

Funding

CircleCI

Company size

Founded

Funding

What is the difference between Harness CI vs. CircleCI?

Continuous Integration

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