Harness Feature Flags vs CloudBees Feature Management

Detailed Feature Comparison

Harness Feature Flags vs. CloudBees Feature Management

SaaS & On-Premises Support:

CloudBees Feature Management only offers a SaaS version of their product. Harness supports both SaaS and on-prem deployment models.

Primary Users:

Delivering software is a process that starts at building an application. In the same way, feature flags should provide value to teams at each phase of the software delivery lifecycle. It’s not just about shipping code faster and creating improvements for users; feature flags should also make daily operations easier, and provide visibility and management ability. Harness Feature Flags was built to support all of these use cases across Developers, Product Managers, Operations, and Engineering Managers. 

The focus is unleashing the power of feature flags for software delivery teams holistically. And while Harness focuses on a developer-first experience, the same workflows and processes are built to support software delivery teams where they struggle the most. Hint: it’s not just shipping features.

Simple Developer Onboarding:

When building Feature Flags, Harness focused heavily on the developer experience - developers are, after all, the true arbiters of feature flags. Our intent was to make sure that the setup process is fast and intuitive, and that teams can get started and see value from feature flags right away. While CloudBees also wants to bring a developer focus, their support for a developer-first experience seems to be in a perpetual beta. 

Feature Flag Pipelines:

Harness features a visual drag-and-drop pipeline builder that supports hundreds of integrations, and this is a standard part of the Harness platform. Users unlock automated progressive delivery, and Harness uniquely allows for automated feature verification so that users don’t have to monitor stages of their rollout and can truly automate rollout and kill switches.

Native CI/CD Support & Pipeline Extensibility:

CloudBees Feature Management is a little different that the other tools we’ve compared. As a full-service CI/CD platform, it does offer some CI/CD pipeline extensibility! Indeed, it has a Jenkins integration, which is leagues better than third-party tools that are completely abstracted from the process. At Harness, we view feature flags as a crucial part of the CI/CD pipeline - and as such, it becomes a natural step in the everyday workflow of development teams and is integrated into CI/CD as a unified pipeline. This allows for users to get visibility into any change from code to release, and create standardized and automated processes across all stages of the SDLC.

As part of the Harness platform, users also can rest easy knowing that they can get a full audit log, manage teams with security like RBAC, share environments and APIs, and see cross-platform analytics. Of course, all of this is available for just Harness Feature Flags, and its power is more pronounced on the platform.

Config-as-Code & GitOps:

CloudBees also understands the importance of making sure Developers have a good experience using a feature flags tool. However, our main issue with what CloudBees has to offer is not in how they do it, but rather in that the feature seems to be in a perpetual beta and only for specific customers. This capability should be easily and broadly available to all developers that seek to use a feature flags solution, which is why Harness features a developer-first experience, all from within our platform.

SDK Support:

Harness and CloudBees support all major languages, both server-side and client-side. However, it would be unjust not to mention that CloudBees, as of today, supports a few more SDKs. Harness Feature Flags has been on the market since July 2021 and supports a total of 10 SDKs. CloudBees supports 13, and it’s only a matter of time until Harness far outpaces the rate of SDK support from CloudBees because of our developer-first focus.

Automated Feature Verifications:

Harness initially pioneered the concept of Continuous Verification in the software delivery space. Having battle-tested the capability over years with hundreds of customers, the ability to have Harness automatically monitor deployments and take appropriate rollout or rollback options is extended into Harness Feature Flags. A unique capability in the world of feature flags, users can use the ML-based automated verification feature to have Harness automatically verify the health of live features and take appropriate remediation action should things go wrong - it obviates the need for users to manually monitor and make changes during a feature rollout.

Security/Access Control:

At Harness, we take security extremely seriously, as evidenced by our DevSecOps approach. We took the same views with Feature Flags, ensuring RBAC was available from inception, with more controls coming soon.  We don’t see the same level of investment in security and access control from CloudBees as of today - a key piece of evaluating any feature flags solution.

Governance & Compliance:

Harness takes governance and compliance seriously, providing CI/CD users with fine-grained RBAC, audit trails, many ways to manage secrets, and more. We’ve taken that same approach with Feature Flags and are investing heavily in the area, letting teams build rules and processes, and helping automate cleanup and flag management. Harness also supports Open Policy Agent (OPA), enabling Enterprise-scale governance as-code across Feature Flags and the rest of the Harness platform. Harness is the only feature management solution to offer this.

Reporting & Dashboards:

Even with some CI/CD support from CloudBees, reporting and dashboards are limited to feature flags data within the tool itself - a key missed opportunity as of today. Harness, however, allows users to link Feature Flags data to the rest of the software development lifecycle, and as such, will provide reporting and dashboards for all products in the same easily-accessible place. Harness is actually the only platform on the market that brings together analytics across the whole SDLC into one place - one tool to rule them all, one tool to bind them.

But what if you’re using only feature flags and don’t care about CI/CD? Harness provides the most complete visibility into feature flags of any tool on the market. Any bit of data that’s related to your feature flags use and operation, you can visualize in Harness to create custom dashboards to show exactly what you need at any time.

*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.