Harness

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.

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

Free Trial

Cloudbees Enterprise is an end-to-end automated software delivery system that allows companies to balance governance & developer freedom.

Company size

501+

Founded

2010

Funding

121.2m

Cloudbees is categorized as:
Continuous Integration

Why choose Harness CI over CloudBees CI?

CloudBees CI is a commercial product that builds on top of Jenkins, an open-source automation server that is commonly used for CI. CloudBees extends Jenkins through proprietary java-based plugins, aiming to solve challenges enterprises face when using Jenkins at scale and running many Jenkins controllers (provisioning controllers, managing RBAC, centrally managed allowed plugins, etc). While doing a decent job providing an enterprise solution on top of Jenkins, it is still constrained by Jenkins outdated architecture and user experience, making it harder to use and administer Cloudbees CI.

Harness CI 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.

Modern Developer Experience

Jenkins pipelines, and therefore CloudBees pipelines, are typically heavily-scripted groovy-based pipelines, which requires high technical skills to author, debug and maintain. CloudBees pipelines are typically defined in a file in a source repository, and edited as text. There are currently no meaningful editors to assist in pipeline authoring (Blue Ocean project is limited and inactive).

Harness pipelines are easy for any developer to use. Harness offers a human-readable Declarative YAML pipeline, reducing complexity by abstracting away the underlying scripting language. Harness pipelines are typically stored As-Code in a Git repository. Advanced built-in Visual and YAML editors fully integrated with Git, along with stater pipelines for common programming languages and build tools, help developers onboard applications in minutes.

Open & Extensible

CloudBees (and Jenkins) plugins are not containerized. They are tightly coupled to the Jenkins infrastructure and require specific configurations and dependencies, resulting in brittle experience such as community plugins breaking following CloudBees upgrades.

Harness CI is open and extensible. Harness supports containerized plugins giving you portability, flexibility, and isolation. Harness CI allows users to run native steps, as well as leverage a large number of community plugins through Drone Plugins, GitHub Actions and Bitrise Steps, unlocking over 5,000 community integrations.

Architected for speed

Harness Cloud can run builds up to 4x faster than every CI tool on the market. We do this through a mix of proprietary technologies like Test Intelligence with 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.

Enterprise Ready

CloudBees helps to alleviate some of the pain associated with using Jenkins at scale. Other than support, Cloudbees offers a fully-tested version of Jenkins that offers more stability and enterprise features such as provisioning Jenkins Controllers at scale, central plugin management, and templates and built-in RBAC. That said, users still have to cope with the many downsides of the Grandfather of CI (e.g. heavily scripted pipelines, plugin incompatibility) making administrating and using CloudBees CI a time consuming task with a steep learning curve.

Harness offers a modern Software Delivery Platform with out of the box enterprise capabilities such as governance controls with OPA based policies, custom dashboards, full audit trails, support for external secret managers, templates to enforce guardrails, and fine grained/customizable RBAC for the entire SDLC.

Admin & Maintenance

Jenkins, and therefore Cloudbees, is one of the most maintenance-intensive CI tools on the market, which is expected from a project that was started in 2004. From our clients’ data, we’ve extrapolated that Jenkins requires between 2-5 FTEs to maintain and administer every year. That time is spent writing scripts, provisioning controllers, maintaining and updating plugins, etc. Cloudbees Enterprise still requires those 2-5 FTEs, but it does make life a bit easier compared to using Jenkins. For one, they offer support, which results in quicker time to resolve issues than by frantically googling questions and hoping someone has run into the same problem before.

Harness CI, on the other hand, has a little administrative overhead requiring .25 FTEs (that’s not a typo). Our SaaS platform doesn't require user maintenance, and administrative tasks (onboarding users, RBAC, etc) are so simple it doesn't require an expert to manage.

Total Cost of Ownership

Cloudbees Enterprise’s total cost of ownership is quite high when you take into consideration that it’s not just the cost of the software – it’s the cost of those 2-5 FTEs as well. Let’s say your average engineer costs you $180,000 – that’s almost a million dollars per year dedicated to a single piece of software – without even accounting for the software itself! Harness CI, however, only “costs” .25 FTEs – at a lower cost compared to CloudBees.

What is the difference between Harness CI Vs. CloudBees?

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

Vault/KMS/3rd

Lightweight

<yes><yes>.25 FTE

<yes><yes> Per User

Free & Paid

500

Heavyweight

<no><no> 2-5 FTE

<yes><yes> Free

Product Type

<yes><yes> SaaS, Hybrid, and On-Premises‍

With Harness you can choose between using Harness Cloud (Harness hosted builds), using a SaaS platform with self-hosted build environment, or a fully self-hosted solution

<with><with> Self-Managed only‍

CloudBees CI is fully self-hosted

Architecture

<yes><yes> Cloud-Native‍

Harness CI offer modern Cloud-Native enterprise-ready CI solution

<with><with> Based on Jenkins‍

CloudBees CI is based on Jenkins, a traditional automation server, carrying many downsides of the Grandfather of CI such as security vulnerabilities, heavily scripted pipelines, etc.

Traditional App Support

Cloud-native App Support

Pipeline Syntax & Complexity

Declarative Yaml‍

Declarative, readable and easy to use yaml syntax that enabled any developer to create and maintain pipelines.

<with><with> Scripted (most common)

While declarative yaml is available, most users use Groovy-based domain specific languages with complex scripting, and use scripted templates.

Pipeline Visual Editor

<yes><yes> Built in Visual Editor‍

Built-in visual editor that is fully integrated with Git, allowing anyone to easily author pipelines.

<no><no> Inactive Blue Ocean Plugin‍

Pipelines are typically defined in a file in a source repository, and edited as text. There is a community project Blue Ocean that provides limited visualization but is no longer maintained.

Pipeline YAML Editor with Auto complete and Schema Validation

<yes><yes> Built in YAML Editor‍

IDE-like built-in yaml editor with auto-complete and schema validation, makes it easy to author pipeline as code. The editor is fully integrated with Git

Container-based plugins support

Integrations

<yes><yes> Multiple types of Community plugin‍

Harness allows you to leverage many types of community plugins: Drone plugins, Github Actions and Bitrise integration

<with><with> Community + Proprietary plugins‍

CloudBees CI includes proprietary plugins designed for large organizations, and supports Jenkins Community plugins.

Tests Intelligence (speed optimization)

Automatic Tests Splitting (speed optimization)

Cache Intelligence (speed optimization)

Policy as Code (OPA)

<yes><yes> Native and simple‍

Open Policy Agent (OPA) based pipeline policies integrated in the platform, allowing you to meet security needs

<no><no> with scripted pipelines‍

Scripted pipelines are dynamic in nature, making it challenging to set pipeline policies.

Templates Library

Flexible & Intuitive

<with><with> Limited and complex

Licensing Model

Free & Paid‍

Harness CI is licensed per developer. Credits for Harness hosted builds are available as add-on.

Paid

Role Based Access (RBAC)

Native and Simple

Complex Configuration

Secrets Management

Native and simple

Complex configuration

Upgrade & Maintenance

<yes><yes> Low efforts (if any)‍

Our SaaS platform take this burden of the customer, while upgrading our self-managed solution require low efforts

Efforts extensive

24/7 Expert Support

with paid plans

*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.