Harness

Continuous Integration

VS

Jenkins X

Harness Continuous Integration vs Jenkins X

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

Jenkins X

Jenkins X provides pipeline automation, built-in GitOps, and preview environments to help teams collaborate and accelerate their software delivery at any scale.

Company size
Company size

1-50

Founded
Founded

2018

Funding
Funding

Jenkins X is categorized as:
Continuous Integration

What is the difference between Harness DevOps Tools Vs. Jenkins X?

Jenkins X 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

3500

<with><with>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

<no><no>

<with><with>

<yes><yes>

Lightweight

<yes><yes> .25 FTE

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes> Free

Features
Harness CI
Jenkins X
Open Source Version

Free & Paid

Free

Harness CCM
Turbonomics
GitHub Stars

24800

3500

Harness CCM
Turbonomics
Self-Service (Simple)

<yes><yes>

<with><with>

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>

<no><no>

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

Lightweight

Harness CCM
Turbonomics
Admin & Maintenance

<yes><yes> .25 FTE

<yes><yes> .25 FTE

Harness CCM
Turbonomics
Total Cost of Ownership

<yes><yes>

<yes><yes>

Harness CCM
Turbonomics
Pricing

<yes><yes> Per User

<yes><yes> Free

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:

Jenkins X is an open-source solution, and as such, only offers an on-prem version. Drone is also open-source. There is, however, also a paid version of Drone that provides access to enterprise support and more integrations and features. Additional features include secrets management options, autoscaling, custom plugins, and more.

Self-Service (Simple):

Jenkins X was created as a cloud-native version of Jenkins, and with that comes Kubernetes , pipeline automation, GitOps, Terraform, secrets management, and more. Some may wonder what the benefits of Kubernetes are, and we’d point you to this: not only can Jenkins X run and scale on Kubernetes itself, it can help you deploy your applications to Kubernetes with a relatively simple setup. Each job is typically run in its own container, run ad-hoc, so it will get placed anywhere within the cluster as you’ve described in your node affinities. Underlying kubelets can scale horizontally if you have Cluster Autoscaler or something similar that’s augmenting your cluster’s elasticity. All this to say, compared to the OG Jenkins, this is a treasure trove of modern features. Less toil, fewer setup issues, no scripting. Fewer person hours on maintenance. Fewer plugins. Easy scaling. But – let’s switch the focus from Jenkins X vs. Jenkins, and look at what we’re all really after: Jenkins X vs. Drone. From a general standpoint, Jenkins X could use further improvement. The tool’s UI is complex, it doesn’t offer good error messaging (ie: why did my build fail?), and lacks integrations. Jenkins X has only a few plugins to its name as well, most of them in this GitHub repo, and while admin and maintenance time/effort is much smaller than on Jenkins (.25 FTEs vs. 2-5 FTEs), it’s still not a completely simple platform. Drone is built upon three pillars that enable engineers to build and test code quickly and accurately: simple, scalable, self-service. Drone installs in under 5 minutes, scales on demand, and all plugins run in containers on their latest version. This means less person hours spent by engineers maintaining the tool, and more time on what matters: getting that code to artifact.

Containerized Plugins:

A great feature of Drone is that everything is run in a container. A massive plus of containerized plugins is that the plugins are maintained to their latest version and create no dependency chains. They require no updating. Drone offers 150 plugins, thereby dramatically increasing the extensibility of the tool. Jenkins X, however, still involves managing dependency versions manually. That is to say, it does not pull dependencies from immutable and versioned container images like Drone. This gives Drone an edge by reducing the maintenance overhead upon the DevOps engineers managing the system.

Secrets Management:

Jenkins X does not offer native secrets management capabilities, but it comes pretty close. It leverages Kubernetes External Secrets, an open-source tool created by GoDaddy engineers, which integrates with third-party secret management tools, such as HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, and Google Secret Manager. Drone offers encryption in its open-source version. Meanwhile, the enterprise version offers these alternatives: encrypted, native, or externally, through third-party providers such as HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secret Manager, and Kubernetes Secrets. No matter how you want your secrets to be handled, Drone can rise to the occasion.

Pricing:

Jenkins X has no pricing associated with it as it is open-source. Drone is also free and available for download. It also has an enterprise version that is extremely feature-rich, but does have pricing attached to it. 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