Harness

Continuous Integration

VS

GitHub Actions

Harness Continuous Integration vs GitHub Actions

Continuous Integration

Harness CI is an enterprise–grade, cloud native CI product. It’s designed for developer self-service while enabling DevOps and Platform engineers to extend granular and customized governance at scale.
Free Trial

GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions works to integrate code provided by your team in a shared repository. Developers share the new code in a merge request (MR).

Company size
Company size

1000+

Founded
Founded

2014

Funding
Funding

434.2m

GitHub is categorized as:
Continuous Integration

What is the difference between Harness CI Vs. GitHub Actions?

GitHub Actions vs Drone: DevOps Tools Comparison

Updated

November 30, 2023

  • Open Source Version
  • GitHub Stars
  • Self-Service (Simple)
  • No Scripting Required
  • Container & Cloud-Native
  • Traditional App Support
  • GitOps (Pipelines as Code)
  • Any Source Code Manager
  • Containerized Pipelines
  • Containerized Plugins
  • Secrets Management
  • Command Line Interface
  • Scalability (Required Infra)
  • Admin & Maintenance
  • Total Cost of Ownership
  • Pricing

Free & Paid

24800

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Vault/KMS/3rd

<yes><yes>

Lightweight

<yes><yes> .25 FTE

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes> Per User

Free & Paid

-

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<with><with>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<with><with> 2 FTE

<no><no>

<yes><yes> Per GitHub product and a OS multiplier

Features
Harness CI
GitHub Actions
Open Source Version

Free & Paid

Free & Paid

Harness CCM
Turbonomics
GitHub Stars

24800

-

Harness CCM
Turbonomics
Self-Service (Simple)

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Harness CCM
Turbonomics
No Scripting Required

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Harness CCM
Turbonomics
Container & Cloud-Native

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Harness CCM
Turbonomics
Traditional App Support

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Harness CCM
Turbonomics
GitOps (Pipelines as Code)

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Harness CCM
Turbonomics
Any Source Code Manager

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Harness CCM
Turbonomics
Containerized Pipelines

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Harness CCM
Turbonomics
Containerized Plugins

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Harness CCM
Turbonomics
Secrets Management

Vault/KMS/3rd

<with><with>

Harness CCM
Turbonomics
Command Line Interface

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Harness CCM
Turbonomics
Scalability (Required Infra)

Lightweight

<yes><yes>

Harness CCM
Turbonomics
Admin & Maintenance

<yes><yes> .25 FTE

<with><with> 2 FTE

Harness CCM
Turbonomics
Total Cost of Ownership

<yes><yes>

<no><no>

Harness CCM
Turbonomics
Pricing

<yes><yes> Per User

<yes><yes> Per GitHub product and a OS multiplier

Harness CCM
Turbonomics
No items found.
No items found.
No items found.
No items found.
No items found.
No items found.
No items found.

Open source vs. Open core:

As counterintuitive as it may sound, almost nothing in GitHub is open source. It may be one of the biggest open source hubs but its own tools are closed source. Drone, on the other hand, was and will always be open source. To quote Jyoti Bansal, Harness founder and CEO, at the time of the acquisition "Drone will always remain open-source, and Harness will invest significantly over the coming years to its community, platform, and mission. In addition, Harness will also contribute several internal projects later this year to the open-source community." Drone has changed the way we did CI and it can do the same for your company.

Self-Service (Simple):

GitHub Actions will recommend CI workflows based on the language and framework in your repository, which is nice but far from self-serve. A true self serve experience especially if you use an SCM tool different from GitHub. Being SCM agnostic has advantages since GitHub Actions is finely tuned to listen to events that happen in GitHub SCM and maybe not so much to you SCM tool of choice. Testing with GitHub Actions doesn't go beyond providing a test result on the Pull Request created. 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 to resolve, and more time on what matters: getting that code to artifact.

Any Source Code Manager:

While GitHub Actions is not limited to GitHub SCM it is indeed finely tuned to it so, the experience of using GitHub Actions with any other source code management provider will differ considerably. Drone, luckily, is vendor-agnostic and allows you to work with your preferred SCM, whether GitLab, GitHub, Bitbucket, or whatever else you choose.

Secrets Management:

GitHub Actions extends secret management capabilities from GitHub itself making it tough to do the same if you are hosting your code elsewhere. 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.

Testing and verification:

GitHub Actions comes with a set of out of the box test suites. They are pretty standard and apply to any language. Harness CI does so too but goes beyond that. Test Intelligence is one of Harness CI's most advanced features. It'll parse the test suite once to get a snapshot of it all. With that it'll be able to apply efficiency gains each time we run the suite by applying only the tests that have changed, run tests to incremental source code changes and, most importantly for security compliance, run test in order of flakiness, meaning, it'll run first those that are more prone to fail so that immediate action can be taken faster. These are just a few of the gains an advanced testing feature like Test Intelligence can provide to a modern CI system compared to GitHub Actions.

Total Cost of Ownership:

When comparing products, it is imperative to take all costs into account. With a product like GitHub, you’re not just paying for the tool – you’re paying for the 2 FTEs it takes to keep the tool in working condition. It’s a large cost to take into account. With Drone, the end result is a tool that is very affordable, with a small commitment of .25 FTEs and low or free pricing (depending on if you decide the features for the enterprise plan are too good to pass up – who doesn’t want autoscaling?).

Pricing:

GitHub Actions is freely available for public repositories but private ones have a 2000 minutes limit on their runner's build time. More minutes are available in paid for plans. If a customer goes beyond a plan’s allotted minutes, they’re billed per minute based on the runner platform. Self-hosted runners are free and the CI/CD capabilities are also available in the GitHub Enterprise self-hosted version. Drone does offer an open-source version that is free, and while the enterprise 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.

Try Harness For Free

Continuous Integration

Interested in seeing what's under the hood? Browse through the Harness Continuous Integration Product

Learn More
Still Not Convinced?

See how Harness stacks up against these other tools.

Ready To Get Started?

Get StartedContact Sales

Need more info? Contact Sales

Continuous Integration