Argo CD vs Harness
Argo CD and Harness are both ci/cd software. Argo CD is open source under Apache-2.0, with 25k GitHub stars. Harness is open source under Apache-2.0, with 39k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Argo CD when
- You deploy to Kubernetes and want Git to be the single source of truth for what runs in each cluster.
- Pick Harness when
- Your team wants one self-hosted box for code, pipelines and packages instead of stitching GitHub, Jenkins and Nexus together.
Side by side
A GitOps continuous delivery tool that keeps Kubernetes clusters in sync with manifests in Git, showing drift and sync status in a web UI.
A self-hosted developer platform combining Git hosting, CI/CD pipelines, cloud dev environments (Gitspaces) and artifact registries in one Docker container. It is the successor to Drone CI.
It only covers deployment to Kubernetes, and at scale the controller and repo server need tuning.
Pipeline features are still catching up with Drone, and the open-source edition is a funnel toward Harness's paid commercial platform.
Production-ready
Usable
Self-hosted server (both)
Go, TypeScript, Redis and Kubernetes
Go, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, SQLite and Docker
Open source, Apache-2.0 (permissive) (both)
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice. (both)
25k GitHub stars
39k GitHub stars
Established: started 8 years ago, latest release v3.5.7.
Established: started 12 years ago, latest release v2.28.2.
Other comparisons
More CI/CD tools
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from each project's README and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.