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Harness vs Semgrep 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Harness
Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
16th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Build Automation (7th), Cloud Cost Management (9th), Feature Management (2nd)
Semgrep
Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
18th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Supply Chain Management Software (3rd), Software Composition Analysis (SCA) (11th), Static Code Analysis (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Static Application Security Testing (SAST) category, the mindshare of Harness is 0.6%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Semgrep is 2.8%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Harness0.6%
Semgrep2.8%
Other96.6%
Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2787357 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Manjunath Maneppagol - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud & Application Security at Sixt SE
Context-aware code analysis has reduced noise and now improves developer experience with actionable security findings
I have consistently observed that their scan time is an issue for mono repos. Sometimes with their AI-based scanning, when you triage that scan, the scan never completes or finishes(, which makes it difficult. Another consistent issue is that whenever you have a new repo to onboard to the platform, the tool ideally should detect the master branch by default. However, sometimes the tool fails to identify it and will never scan it unless manually somebody looks into it and fixes the issue. Although their support team is really good, this issue was present six or eight months ago during the POC and is still present now. If it is affecting multiple customers, it should be prioritized and fixed. I would say that their integration aspects could have been improved. I see a lot of different security solutions that provide flexibility to the security teams based on Jira project, team divisions, Slack, and all those can be very much easily customized. Semgrep needs to work on the enhancement of their notification capabilities. Currently, they are working on identifying business logic vulnerabilities or privilege escalation vulnerabilities by looking at the code, and they should continue to focus on and improve this effort. Regarding stability, whenever you have a mono-repo which is a very large repository, the scan never finishes or the scan never kicks in. At that time, you have to reach out to the support team and ask them to expand the resources in the back end to fix it. This is an issue I keep seeing often on that platform.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"Harness starts integrating with organizations, making everything automated without the need for manual interruption."
"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."
"Everything in Harness is configured and runs smoothly."
"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%."
"Harness integrates all functions like execution pipelines, environment checks, and log monitoring in one place, making it convenient."
"Compared to other competitors in the market, the AI-backed capability is the biggest strength of Semgrep."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to write our custom rules."
 

Cons

"There's also room for improvement in debugging pipeline issues, which can sometimes become complex."
"Infrastructure as code or pipeline as code is something that Harness severely lacks."
"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."
"When integrating Harness with more than twenty applications in one place, it becomes less stable, causing improvements to be necessary."
"Harness setup and configurations could be made easier to configure, which would be helpful."
"I prefer the previous less compact UI version of Harness, which showed more details on the screen."
"The first point for improvement is the steep learning curve, where concepts such as services, environment, pipelines, and templates take time to understand."
"There should be more information on how to acquire the system, catering to beginners in application security, to make it more user-friendly."
"I have consistently observed that their scan time is an issue; sometimes with their AI-based scanning, when you triage that scan, the scan never completes or finishes, which makes it difficult."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
29%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Retailer
5%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Large Enterprise7
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Harness?
It's a highly customizable DevOps tool.
What needs improvement with Harness?
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 bec...
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 ...
What needs improvement with Semgrep?
I have consistently observed that their scan time is an issue for mono repos. Sometimes with their AI-based scanning, when you triage that scan, the scan never completes or finishes(, which makes i...
What is your primary use case for Semgrep?
I have been working with Semgrep for almost a year, approximately six to eight months on and off. In my current organization, I have a strong experience for SAST solution POCs, and I have conducted...
What advice do you have for others considering Semgrep?
You should primarily focus on what your use case is and why you are moving out. If you are moving out just from the perspective of cost, I do not think Semgrep is the best solution for you. However...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Armory
Semgrep Code, Semgrep Supply Chain, Semgrep AppSec Platform
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Linedata, Openbank, Home Depot, Advanced
Policygenius, Tide, Lyft, Thinkific, FloQast, Vanta, and Fareportal
Find out what your peers are saying about Harness vs. Semgrep and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.