No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Apptio Costing vs Harness comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.3
Apptio Costing boosts ROI through cloud cost management, automation, improved transparency, and stronger IT-finance-business relationships for efficiency.
Sentiment score
7.5
Enhanced efficiency reduces manual effort and errors, increases success rates, and justifies licensing costs with significant time savings.
Making decisions behind tech investments is easier with the budgeting tool Apptio Costing provides.
Senior Software Engineer at Total Gas & Power Limited
I have seen a return on investment; we have acceleration of the planning processes, a controlled environment, automation that saves time and cost, and project accounting has been great and transparent.
Team Lead at Wells Fargo
I have seen a return on investment, as identifying ownership gaps in technology and applications has been easy while providing IT leaders with operational details tied to the financials, such as how much we are spending on projects versus what we think we are spending.
Team Lead at UST Global
By adopting templates and various different pipelines across our own IDP platform, we have saved upwards of 30 to 40% of development time.
Technical Associate at ZS
With Harness, the release process decreased from three or four hours to one or two hours, making deployments much quicker.
Software Engineer at Citi
I believe the efficiency improvement is more than a twenty to thirty percent increase compared to Jenkins.
Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
8.3
Apptio Costing's customer service is responsive and professional, offering 24/7 support, quick issue resolution, and enhances user ideas.
Sentiment score
8.4
Harness customer service is efficient and responsive, providing quick issue resolution and enhancing user experience with detailed communication.
The customer support is professional and responsive
Project Manager at Flextronics
Whenever there is a technical issue, it is resolved quickly within hours, not days.
Director of Operations at Procter & Gamble
The customer support for Apptio Costing is very great as they are supportive and responsive 24/7.
Team Lead at UST Global
We have rarely faced issues with Harness tech support.
Senior AWS Consultant at Quantum Integrators
We have not faced any customer support issues, with tickets resolved in less than a four-day SLA.
Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
We have been receiving incident reports whenever an incident occurs on Harness, and they are usually quick to respond.
Technical Associate at ZS
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Apptio Costing is praised for its scalability, effectively supporting organizational growth and evolving financial management needs.
Sentiment score
8.0
Harness is highly scalable, effectively supports multiple teams and applications, and meets enterprise needs in cloud environments.
Apptio Costing's scalability is very good as it grows with my organization's needs.
Team Lead at UST Global
Apptio Costing's scalability is very good and has handled my organization's growth well, making it very scalable.
Project Manager at Unilever Inc.
Apptio Costing is very scalable and grows with my organization's needs.
Project Manager at Flextronics
Our entire organization uses it with hundreds of applications, and it supports this scale effectively.
Senior Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
It is able to work on our infrastructure side, which is EKS, and we are able to handle our organization growth effectively for an enterprise use case.
Technical Associate at ZS
When I integrated Harness to more than 20 applications in one place, it becomes less stable.
Software Engineer at Citi
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.7
Apptio Costing is highly reliable, consistently stable, with users praising its steady performance and meeting of expectations without downtime.
Sentiment score
7.6
Harness is reliable in production, though stability decreases with many integrations, requiring better integration improvements despite some downtime.
Apptio Costing is very stable, and I have not experienced any downtime or lagging.
Senior Software Engineer at Total Gas & Power Limited
Harness is completely stable, and we are using it in production without facing any stability issues at all.
Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
We have rarely faced issues with Harness tech support.
Senior AWS Consultant at Quantum Integrators
Harness is decently stable.
Technical Associate at ZS
 

Room For Improvement

Apptio Costing users seek more plans, better integrations, enhanced UI, improved BI reporting, and efficient IT ticket handling.
Harness could improve appeal to smaller teams by simplifying setup, enhancing UI, refining onboarding, and addressing cost and learning curve issues.
It is worth mentioning that Apptio Costing does not have historical balance sheets.
Team Lead at UST Global
The user interface should be improved to be more user-friendly, easy to navigate, and customizable.
Project Manager at Flextronics
Fixed asset data input needs to allow for more details, such as quantities by line item and not by total amount, to improve usability in Apptio Costing.
Director of Operations at Procter & Gamble
There is not a lot of good support for pipeline as code, and I often find myself not using pipeline as code the way other platforms such as GitHub Actions or Jenkins integrate pipeline as code.
Technical Associate at ZS
Improved documentation and onboarding tutorials would help accelerate adoption.
Cloud Platform Engineer at Futurescape Technology
Harness can be improved by providing more clarity on the credits it issues for Harness Cloud, as it has a tiered pricing structure involving license and credit costs, which can get confusing.
Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
 

Setup Cost

Apptio Costing is praised for its affordable pricing and efficient setup, offering a cost-effective solution for enterprises.
I found it to be very cost-effective and easy to set up.
Project Manager at Flextronics
the licensing is very affordable
Team Lead at Wells Fargo
the licensing cost is affordable and very cost-effective.
Project Manager at Unilever Inc.
From what I understand with respect to Harness, licensing and setup costs were relatively low for an enterprise, and the pricing was more catered toward enterprises who would invest in the technology.
Technical Associate at ZS
 

Valuable Features

Apptio Costing streamlines expense tracking, integrates data, enhances budgeting, improves decision-making, and supports customizable, user-friendly financial planning tools.
Harness offers automated pipelines, smart features, Kubernetes integration, and seamless team coordination for efficient, reliable software delivery.
Apptio Costing provides IT leaders with operational details tied to the financials, indicating how much we are spending on projects versus what we think we are spending.
Project Manager at Flextronics
The analytics and reporting features help me to gain insights on how our budget looks, enabling me to make data-driven decisions easily.
Director of Operations at Procter & Gamble
The ease of navigation and data visualization features help my team by enabling cost management optimization, which includes detailed expense tracking, cost transparency, and efficient financial planning functionality.
Software Engineer at Shell
Harness uses AI to suggest errors in case of deployment failures.
Senior Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
The platform also supports cloud-native environments and Kubernetes deployments, making pipeline management easier, and its automation capabilities significantly improve speed and reliability.
Cloud Platform Engineer at Futurescape Technology
The best features in Harness are its user-friendliness and setup configuration.
Senior AWS Consultant at Quantum Integrators
 

Categories and Ranking

Apptio Costing
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
18th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Harness
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
9th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Build Automation (7th), Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (16th), Feature Management (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Cloud Cost Management category, the mindshare of Apptio Costing is 0.9%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Harness is 2.0%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Cost Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Harness2.0%
Apptio Costing0.9%
Other97.1%
Cloud Cost Management
 

Featured Reviews

Noah Trevor - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at Unilever Inc.
Improved financial transparency has driven data-based decisions and optimized IT service costs
Apptio Costing offers exceptional reporting features that are second to none, showing companies what data to collect and how to go about creating and collecting consistent data, providing visibility into the IT department unlike any other software, and always improving and getting better. The reporting feature is second to none. The standard out-of-the-box reporting shows incredible insights and gives the information executives need to make the correct decisions easily. Service costing is another valuable feature. If you have to buy any module, this will be it. Comprehensive bottom-up service cost analysis and reporting is excellent. Apptio Costing has positively impacted my organization in every way. It has been beneficial to each and every customer, and its relatively quick implementation process saves time. The savings that are provided by finding unnecessary servers, expensive storage, or even phone bills that are not being utilized but paid for is incredible. Employees can make better decisions based on facts and not on assumptions about the unknown benefit of the IT department. Our IT department is now treated as an asset to the business and not just an expense. Our company can now make better technical investments and also increase productivity by a larger margin. Specific outcomes and metrics include an improvement in productivity from 40 to 55 percent improvement. Cost reduction has been significant, where we have reduced cost from 45 to 25 percent.
MK
Technical Associate at ZS
Templatized pipelines have improved efficiency while limitations in code-based development remain
Harness UI can do a lot of good things. Harness's UI should not feel very complicated. At the current stage, it feels very commercialized and compared to other platforms such as Argo CD or Jenkins, which feel much more lively and much more simple. Infrastructure as code or pipeline as code is something that Harness severely lacks. There is not a lot of good support for pipeline as code, and I often find myself not using pipeline as code the way other platforms such as GitHub Actions or Jenkins integrate pipeline as code. Pipeline as code is definitely one of the disadvantages when it comes to Harness. Additionally, the entire platform feels very commercialized, which is something that a lot of developers, especially open-source enthusiasts, might not appreciate even within the organization. One of the very important key factors I observed was that there is no way to execute nested pipelines, which means that we cannot execute child pipelines within child pipelines and child pipelines even within those child pipelines. There is no way to execute nested pipeline execution, which may or may not be required based on the use case, but it is definitely one of those features that I wish the platform had.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Cost Management solutions are best for your needs.
885,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Insurance Company
73%
Construction Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
3%
Manufacturing Company
3%
Financial Services Firm
27%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Retailer
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Large Enterprise9
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apptio Costing?
Regarding my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing, I found it to be very cost-effective and easy to set up.
What needs improvement with Apptio Costing?
One way Apptio Costing can be improved is that data linking has been a limitation for any organization when integrating with other applications like Snowflake or ERP.The user interface should be im...
What is your primary use case for Apptio Costing?
Apptio Costing is used primarily for IT budgeting and forecasting, for both departmental operating expenses and project financial categories, many of which are internally tracked and critical for o...
What do you like most about Harness?
It's a highly customizable DevOps tool.
What needs improvement with Harness?
Harness can be improved by providing more clarity on the credits it issues for Harness Cloud, as it has a tiered pricing structure involving license and credit costs, which can get confusing. Addit...
What is your primary use case for Harness?
Harness helps us build a pipeline with containerized steps that isolates virtual machines, reduces DevOps-based drifts, and improves our process by integrating several security testing-related step...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Apptio Costing and Planing
Armory
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Linedata, Openbank, Home Depot, Advanced
Find out what your peers are saying about Apptio Costing vs. Harness and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.