GNU Make vs Harness comparison

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GNU Make

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

GNU Make and Harness are competitive tools in the software development space, specializing in build automation and continuous delivery, respectively. Harness often holds the upper hand due to its comprehensive functionalities and advanced automation capabilities, justifying its higher cost for many users.

Features: GNU Make is renowned for its efficient handling of complex build processes, robust automation features, and effective dependency management. Harness provides cutting-edge continuous delivery features, simplifying deployment pipelines and offering seamless integration with various CI/CD tools. This distinction highlights GNU Make in build automation and Harness in deployment automation with advanced capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: GNU Make benefits from easy installation and a wealth of community-supported resources and documentation. Harness, with its more complex deployment process, provides dedicated customer service, customizing solutions to meet enterprise needs. This in-depth support differentiates Harness from GNU Make's community reliance.

Pricing and ROI: GNU Make, as an open-source tool, incurs no setup cost, making it an attractive option for maximizing returns with minimal investment. Harness requires a significant initial investment due to its premium pricing model. However, its robust features often deliver substantial ROI for businesses seeking sophisticated automation solutions. The contrast lies in GNU Make's cost-effectiveness and Harness's value-driven approach.

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

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GNU Make vs. Harness

December 2025

Helped 881,082 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

GNU Make

Ranking in Build Automation

16th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

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 GNU Make is 1.5%, up from 0.6% 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%
GNU Make	1.5%
Other	92.7%

Build Automation

Featured Reviews

Josh Call

Software Engineer at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

Enhances productivity with efficient dependency handling and a straightforward setup

GNU Make is used as a build system tool. Most people don't use GNU Make directly but utilize other systems like CMake to generate Make files, which are then run by GNU Make. This is common for tasks like compiling C++ code. In the industry, AI developers, for example, use GNU Make in their work…

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reviewer2787357

Site Reliability Engineer at Granicus Inc.

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

"Setup is extremely straightforward."

"Full-featured syntax allows building strategies as simple or as complex as one wishes, and declarative approach fits the task really well. Wide adoption also means that everybody knows what GNU Make is and how to use it."

"I have not encountered any scalability issues with GNU Make. It is as scalable as the project's structure is, and then some."

"GNU Make is such an essential tool that it is almost impossible to imagine working without it. Not having it, developers would probably have to resort to doing everything manually or via shell scripts."

"Makefiles are extremely easy to work with using any preferred editor. GNU Make can be run directly from the terminal, not requiring any time wasted on clicking."

"The initial setup of GNU Make is straightforward."

"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%."

"Everything in Harness is configured and runs smoothly."

"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."

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

"It's a highly customizable DevOps tool."

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

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

Cons

"Vanilla GNU Make does not support any kind of colored output. A wrapper named colormake exists to work around this, but native (opt-in) support would be welcome."

"GNU Make does not provide traditional customer support."

"GNU Make requires using the Tab symbol as the first symbol of command line for execution. In some text editors this can be problematic, as they automatically insert spaces instead of tabs."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pricing and Cost Advice

"GNU Make is free and open source software."

"There is no price for this product. No licensing. It’s open-source."

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Financial Services Firm

29%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Large Enterprise	7

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for GNU Make?

GNU Make is a free solution that comes with Linux, which positively impacts operational costs by eliminating licensing fees.

What needs improvement with GNU Make?

I am not familiar enough with it to suggest any specific new features or areas for improvement. It occupies its niche well.

What is your primary use case for GNU Make?

What do you like most about Harness?

It's a highly customizable DevOps tool.

What needs improvement with Harness?

What is your primary use case for Harness?

My main use case for Harness is continuous deployment (CD), specifically for safe, automated deployment to production, especially in Kubernetes and cloud environments. For continuous deployment in ...

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Product Reports

Download GNU Make product report

Build Automation

January 2026

Download Harness product report

January 2026

Also Known As

No data available

Armory

Overview

Make is a tool which controls the generation of executables and other non-source files of a program from the program's source files.

GNU

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

Information Not Available

Linedata, Openbank, Home Depot, Advanced