A Modern Chaos Engineering Platform Built for Enterprise Scale

Harness Chaos Engineering goes beyond fault injection. It’s designed for engineering teams that want to embed resilience across every phase of software delivery—from developer environments to production. With AI-powered test recommendations, cross-platform coverage, security guardrails, and full CI/CD integration, Harness helps teams shift from manual chaos testing to automated, intelligent resilience strategies.

Gremlin, while a pioneer in chaos engineering, has evolved into a reliability management tool focused on static testing snapshots. It provides basic fault injection and reliability scoring for predefined services but lacks the breadth, flexibility, and automation needed to scale chaos engineering across modern engineering organizations.

Broadest Fault Coverage Across Cloud, On-Prem, and Hybrid Environments

Harness offers over 220 out-of-the-box chaos experiments, including fault injection for Kubernetes, AWS (ECS, Lambda, RDS, EC2, SSM), VMware, Windows, Linux, and Cloud Foundry. These tests span deep infrastructure, service-level disruptions, and application-level failures.

Whether your workloads run on Kubernetes, in VMs, or across serverless environments, Harness helps teams validate real-world resilience risks. For custom needs, you can also “Bring Your Own Chaos” by embedding custom logic or SDKs directly into your workflows.

By contrast, Gremlin supports a limited set of generalized faults. This restricts its ability to test diverse infrastructure or meet the complex needs of enterprise platforms.

AI-Native Resilience: Discover, Recommend, and Automate

Harness is the only chaos platform that brings AI into every stage of resilience testing. It automatically discovers Kubernetes services and dependencies, recommends experiments tailored to those services, and will soon include intelligent risk identification and mitigation plans across K8s and non-K8s environments.

This AI-native foundation means your team spends less time scripting and configuring—and more time fixing real reliability gaps. Gremlin does not provide any AI-based automation or discovery capabilities, making it harder to scale chaos adoption beyond early users or SREs.

Seamless Integration into CI/CD and GitOps Workflows

Harness is uniquely integrated with its own Continuous Delivery platform, enabling users to run chaos tests as part of every release. You can inject chaos automatically when a new deployment occurs, when infrastructure changes, or when flagged thresholds are crossed. Even if you don’t use Harness CD, Harness Chaos integrates easily with external tools via API and SDKs.

Gremlin lacks native CI/CD integration and requires manual setup for test orchestration, slowing down feedback loops and increasing reliance on SREs.

Built to Scale with Centralized Execution

Harness Chaos Engineering is architected for scale. At the heart of this is the Centralized Execution Plane, which leverages the Harness Delegate to coordinate chaos experiments across thousands of services, clusters, and accounts—all from a single control plane. This architecture eliminates the need to manually deploy and maintain agents on every target system. Instead, a lightweight delegate communicates securely with your infrastructure, orchestrating experiments, collecting telemetry, and enforcing governance from a single place.

In contrast, Gremlin's architecture often requires teams to manually manage, deploy, and update chaos agents across every environment and workload. This can create significant operational overhead as environments grow, particularly in Kubernetes, hybrid, or multi-cloud setups. Harness’s centralized approach drastically reduces maintenance burden and makes it possible to scale chaos engineering across an entire organization without scaling your operations team.

Built-in Resilience Score and Observability Probes

Harness allows teams to define and track a Resilience Score for every experiment or service. This score can be customized with weighted criteria and mapped back to organizational SLOs. In addition, Harness supports multiple probe types—including Prometheus queries, Kubernetes health checks, HTTP responses, and command-based checks—to validate system behavior before, during, and after chaos experiments.

Gremlin provides basic status checks, but does not support resilience scoring, weighted configurations, or rich observability integrations.

Enterprise-Grade Governance and Security

Harness offers advanced security and governance features from day one: fine-grained RBAC, audit trails, Open Policy Agent (OPA) policy enforcement, Kubernetes admission control, and external secrets management. Chaos logs can be exported to external storage like AWS S3 for long-term compliance and forensics.

Gremlin offers basic RBAC and audit logging, but does not support advanced policy controls, air-gapped deployments, or bring-your-own-secrets models—making it less suited for highly regulated industries or enterprises with strict security postures.

Unified with Your Software Delivery Platform

Harness Chaos Engineering is not a standalone tool. It’s a fully integrated module within the Harness Software Delivery Platform, which also includes Continuous Delivery, Feature Flags, Cloud Cost Management, Security Testing, SLOs, and Incident Management. This unified architecture allows teams to coordinate deployments, releases, chaos experiments, and post-incident analysis within a single pane of glass.

Gremlin does not offer any software delivery modules or platform integrations beyond its core fault injection workflows.

Why Enterprises Are Choosing Harness Over Gremlin

From Deutsche Bank using Harness to accelerate disaster recovery testing, to United Airlines ensuring zero-downtime for 400+ modernized apps, enterprises trust Harness for one reason: it scales chaos engineering from an SRE-led exercise into a collaborative, automated, and secure enterprise practice.

If you’re looking for a modern, flexible chaos engineering solution that integrates across your entire delivery lifecycle, Harness is purpose-built to get you there.

*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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