Harness Continuous Integration vs GitHub Actions

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.

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