CircleCI vs Harness comparison

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CircleCI

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 11, 2025

CircleCI and Harness are competing in the CI/CD domain. CircleCI has the upper hand in pricing and support, while Harness is favored for its powerful features and perceived value.

Features: CircleCI offers robust customization options, a high degree of parallelism, and comprehensive integration capabilities. Harness focuses on automation, continuous verification processes, and advanced governance capabilities.

Room for Improvement: CircleCI could enhance its automation scope, improve governance controls, and expand verification processes. Harness might benefit from simplifying initial setup, reducing cost barriers, and enhancing manual support interventions.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: CircleCI provides flexible deployment with both cloud and on-premise solutions, characterized by quick setup and responsive support. Harness emphasizes zero-touch automation in deployment, though setup can be complex, with a focus on long-term customer relationships.

Pricing and ROI: CircleCI appeals with a predictable and competitive cost model for smaller teams. Harness, though costlier, offers substantial ROI through its advanced features that enhance efficiency. Enterprises often find the investment in Harness justified due to its operational benefits.

To learn more, read our detailed CircleCI vs. Harness Report (Updated: December 2025).

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CircleCI vs. Harness

December 2025

Helped 879,986 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

CircleCI

Ranking in Build Automation

13th

Average Rating

6.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

AI Software Development (200th)

Harness

Ranking in Build Automation

7th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (16th), Cloud Cost Management (9th), Feature Management (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of CircleCI is 3.5%, up from 3.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Harness is 5.8%, up from 5.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Harness	5.8%
CircleCI	3.5%
Other	90.7%

Build Automation

Featured Reviews

RahulArora

Global Head - DevOps and AIOps Startegist at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Automated CI/CD pipelines have transformed deployment speed and collaboration for my teams

CircleCI offers fast parallel builds, easy integration with GitHub, and the ability to deploy applications on Kubernetes pods, which are amazing features. Fast parallel builds and GitHub integration have definitely helped my team reach faster time to market for our applications. Previously, our deployment used to take a couple of hours when doing it manually, but with CircleCI pipeline, our hours-long job has been converted to a couple of minutes. Its simplicity, fast pipeline execution, and strong GitHub and GitLab integrations are definitely unique advantages I discovered while using CircleCI. Time saved is one of the key aspects I have seen since using CircleCI. I have noticed fewer deployment errors, and it has helped me with easy debugging. Time saved is directly proportional to the cost and effort saved. CircleCI has positively impacted my organization by integrating directly with my Git repositories as a fully managed SaaS platform. CircleCI has a great impact on my team's collaboration and communication, with around 25 to 40 developers and DevOps engineers using it daily across multiple repositories and environments, helping us use it at scale. CircleCI has significantly increased our release frequency and deployment speed compared to before I started using it. CircleCI improves security for my organization by enforcing automated checks in the pipeline and securely managing secrets through environment variables while providing auditable deployments. CircleCI integrates seamlessly with my DevOps toolchain by connecting directly to GitHub, container registries, and my cloud platform AWS, allowing the entire CI/CD flow from code commit to deployment and monitoring with minimal manual effort.

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reviewer2787357

Site Reliability Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

Automated delivery has made production releases safer and has reduced deployment incidents

The first point for improvement is the steep learning curve, where concepts such as services, environment, pipelines, and templates take time to understand. New users often need training before becoming productive, resulting in slower initial onboarding compared to simpler CD tools. An improvement idea is better guided onboarding with more opinionated defaults and examples. The second improvement can be on UI complexity and navigation; the UI can feel cluttered with many options and finding past executions, logs, or specific settings sometimes takes extra clicks, leading to small but noticeable productivity loss. Simplified UI views for common workflows and improved search and filtering could help. I also see cost and licensing as potential areas for improvement, as pricing can feel high for small teams and advanced features are tied to higher tiers, which may limit adoption for startups or smaller organizations. Flexible pricing models and more essential features in lower tiers could address this issue.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Enables us to detect exactly which build failed and why, and to push multiple builds to our production environment at a very fast rate."

"It's a stable product."

"CircleCI has positively impacted the organization, as it has been used for many years and serves as the main source for application deployment."

"The ability to automate the build process in a seamless way and run workflows effortlessly. It supports parallel builds so it can scale well. Also, it covers the basics of any build and integration tool, including email notifications (especially when tests are fixed), project insights, etc."

"The solution offers continuous integration and continuous delivery."

"Some of the most valuable features include container-based builds, integration with Bit Bucket and being able to store artifacts."

"The automation workflow in CircleCI related to third-party applications is very good and allows standardization of applications."

"CircleCI has significantly reduced build and deployment times, saving substantial engineering hours and effort for me, which has directly improved my productivity and release velocity, reflecting incredible ROI."

"By adopting templates and various different pipelines across our own IDP platform, we have saved upwards of 30 to 40% of development time and also reduced risks of failures or error rates by upwards of 70%."

"Production deployments are faster and more reliable, especially for Kubernetes and cloud-based services, with significant reduction in deployment-related incidents, faster recovery when issues occur, faster, more confident releases, increased deployment frequency with higher confidence, and better governance and compliance that improved visibility and coordination across Dev, QA, Ops, and SRE teams."

"Harness integrates all functions like execution pipelines, environment checks, and log monitoring in one place, making it convenient."

"The features of Harness are valuable, supporting rolling deployments, basic deployments, and blue-green deployments with zero downtime."

"Everything in Harness is configured and runs smoothly."

"It's a highly customizable DevOps tool."

"Harness starts integrating with organizations, making everything automated without the need for manual interruption."

"Harness integrates all functions like execution pipelines, environment checks, and log monitoring in one place."

Cons

"Integration with Microsoft Azure is one area for improvement. Azure is growing in its user base, and supports various cloud infrastructure components such as Service Fabric, App Service, etc. Some of Azure’s deployment models (like Kudu) require a steep learning curve, but if CircleCI would come up with such features (deployment to App Service) out of the box, it would be amazing."

"The solution’s pricing could be better."

"There needs to be some improvement in the user interface of CircleCI."

"I believe debugging complex pipelines and managing credits can sometimes be challenging, especially for large workflows, so these areas can be improved."

"A return on investment with CircleCI has not been observed, and no relevant metrics such as time saved or fewer employees needed can be shared."

"Billing is a mess."

"I prefer the previous less compact UI version of Harness, which showed more details on the screen."

"Infrastructure as code or pipeline as code is something that Harness severely lacks."

"The first point for improvement is the steep learning curve, where concepts such as services, environment, pipelines, and templates take time to understand."

"There's also room for improvement in debugging pipeline issues, which can sometimes become complex."

"Even with automation, there's a requirement for manual change requests for approvals."

"Harness setup and configurations could be made easier to configure, which would be helpful."

"When deploying multiple components to multiple environments, like production and BCP, failures sometimes occur. Improvements are needed when deploying one component to one environment."

"When integrating Harness with more than twenty applications in one place, it becomes less stable, causing improvements to be necessary."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of CircleCI could be less expensive."

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

University

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

28%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	4

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Large Enterprise	7

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CircleCI?

There is not much experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing because that is managed by the legal team.

What needs improvement with CircleCI?

CircleCI's Orbs are not as easy to use as they could be. If CircleCI implemented a function approach similar to GitHub Actions, it would be significantly better. CircleCI could be improved if it co...

What advice do you have for others considering CircleCI?

For others looking into using CircleCI, study thoroughly about CircleCI's Orbs because they are quite complicated. The overall review rating for CircleCI is 6 out of 10.

What do you like most about Harness?

It's a highly customizable DevOps tool.

What needs improvement with Harness?

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,...

What is your primary use case for Harness?

Harness has been implemented in our organization for one of our clients for approximately 8 to 10 months. Harness is particularly utilized for our infrastructure provisioning pipelines and our RITM...

GitHub Actions vs CircleCI

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Compared 17% of the time

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Compared 9% of the time

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Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

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Compared 3% of the time

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Product Reports

Download CircleCI product report

Build Automation

January 2026

Download Harness product report

January 2026

Also Known As

No data available

Armory

Overview

CircleCI is a continuous integration and delivery platform that automates software development, streamlining the process for engineers and developers. It's valued for its ability to enhance development speed while maintaining high software quality.

Known for its robust CI/CD capabilities, CircleCI supports a wide range of programming languages and integrations, allowing teams to build and deploy code with efficiency and reliability. Its flexibility and automation features help teams quickly adapt to changing project requirements. CircleCI's cloud-based architecture ensures scalability and accessibility, making it an attractive option for modern development environments.

What are CircleCI's key features?

Continuous Integration: Automates code integration with testing to catch errors early.
Continuous Deployment: Simplifies the process of deploying code to production environments.
Customizable Workflows: Offers flexibility in defining build, test, and deployment stages.
Parallel Execution: Speeds up builds by running multiple tasks at once.
VCS Integration: Seamlessly integrates with platforms like GitHub and Bitbucket.

What benefits can users expect when using CircleCI?

Increased Efficiency: Streamlines development workflows, reducing the time to market.
Improved Code Quality: Early error detection through automation increases overall quality.
Scalability: Ability to handle growing workloads as development needs evolve.
Enhanced Collaboration: Facilitates teamwork through shared visibility and control over development processes.

In tech-driven industries, CircleCI enables efficient software development pipelines. Its ability to run automated tests and manage deployments effectively is particularly beneficial in fast-paced, innovation-driven fields like fintech, mobile app development, and SaaS platforms. Offering tools that meet high-demand environments, it supports teams in delivering timely and quality software products.

CircleCI

Harness offers a comprehensive toolset for automating deployment processes and enhancing software update efficiency. It's lauded for its CI/CD capabilities, feature flagging, and real-time deployment monitoring. Key features include an intuitive UI, secret management, and robust rollback functionalities, all contributing to improved productivity and reduced errors in DevOps environments.

Sample Customers

Shopify, Zenefits, Concur Technologies, CyberAgent

Linedata, Openbank, Home Depot, Advanced