Harness Feature Flags vs Unleash

Detailed Feature Comparison

Harness Feature Flags vs. Unleash

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 on unleashing the power of feature flags for software delivery teams holistically. 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 so teams can get started and see value right away. As of today, we don’t see this sort of first-class support for developers coming from Unleash. 

Feature Flag Pipelines:

Harness features a visual drag-and-drop pipeline builder that supports hundreds of integrations, 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. Unleash does allow for some of the use cases supported by Pipelines, such as staging rollouts and scheduling them.

Native CI/CD Support & Pipeline Extensibility:

Unleash, as a third-party tool, is completely abstracted from your CI/CD process, which perpetuates the view that feature flags are an ancillary step. 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 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:

It’s important to meet developers where they are and work within their processes. With Harness, teams have the ability to create pipelines visually and combine that with a pipelines-as-code or config-as-code approach. Visual pipelines create YAML files that can be changed to reflect back into the visual pipeline, and these can automatically be synced with Git so changes are reflected immediately and without added effort, all from within our platform.

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. 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. This process removes the need for users to manually monitor and make changes during a feature rollout.
Unleash doesn’t provide feature verification today. In fact, it seems to stop short of automating any part of the feature management lifecycle. While there are some integrations, we don’t see the ability to leverage that information to either roll out a flag or to manage it based on incoming data.

Governance & Compliance:

Harness takes governance and compliance seriously, providing CI/CD users with fine-grained RBAC, audit trails, secrets management, 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:

Since Unleash is a standalone feature flags tool, reporting and dashboards are limited to data within the tool itself. Harness, however, is in the process of linking 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.
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.