Harness.io is one of the most popular platforms today for automating continuous delivery (CD). The platform enables engineers to rapidly build CD pipelines (Harness Smart Automation), automatically verify code changes to reduce rollbacks (Harness Continuous Verification), and deliver enterprise-grade security (Harness Continuous Security) for teams of all sizes. With Harness Cost Management, you can even optimize your AWS cloud costs.
Even so, Harness may not be the best platform for every stack, business value delivery goal, or user experience objective. For example, Harness.io:
- Lacks commenting features for developers and deployment teams to collaborate
- Relies on a third-party product for artifact security scanning
- Lacks an integrated SCM capability
- Doesn’t provide cloud cost intelligence, with cloud spend mapped to business dimensions
Whether you’re looking at Harness for continuous delivery, continuous integration, security, or even as a cloud cost management solution, this guide will cover some of the top alternatives to consider while evaluating different platforms and tools.
1. Cost Management Alternative: CloudZero
Year Founded: 2014
Category: Cloud cost intelligence for AWS, Kubernetes, and Snowflake
Best For: Any company wanting to map cloud costs to their business processes, products, and people — without endless tagging, additional tools, or hiring more DevOps personnel.
Pricing Model: Custom-tailored to your environment, not based on a percentage of your cloud spend. Get custom CloudZero pricing here.
CloudZero collects real-time cost and utilization insights from tagged, untaggable, untagged, and shared resources in AWS, Kubernetes, and Snowflake environments.
CloudZero’s cloud cost intelligence platform normalizes, analyses, and aligns cost data to the specific people, processes, and products that created them.
With unit cost analysis, you can provide each business unit with the details they require to maximize cloud cost ROI:
- Engineers – Get cost per product feature, cost per deployment, cost per dev team, cost per environment, cost per project, etc. Engineers can see the effects their architectural decisions have on cloud costs, empowering them to make rapid updates and feature releases without going over budget.
- Finance – Track cost per customer, cost per customer per feature, etc. so you can calculate SaaS pricing that maximizes return on investment
- Team leaders – Keep track of costs for CI/CD projects, new product launches, development teams, and receive anomalous cost alerts via Slack or email to prevent overspending.
- C-Suite – Identify where economies of scale are being used by tracking cost of goods sold (COGS), cost per product launch, etc.
- The Board – Analyze the costs of different business units to improve profitability so the company can attract investors who will fund more robust feature releases.
Unlike Harness, CloudZero gives you a detailed view of where your cloud spend is going, what is driving it, and why it is changing. Finance and engineering can more easily align to maximize cloud efficiency with this cost intelligence. See CloudZero in action by scheduling a demo here.
2. CD Alternative: AWS CodePipeline
Year Founded: 2015
Category: AWS continuous deployment tool
Best For: Companies that are interested in automating the steps involved in releasing software on the AWS ecosystem without complex CD requirements.
Pricing Model: Pay per use.
CodePipeline provides a way for engineers to automate software deployment so they can release updates to their apps quickly. It does this by helping engineers automatically build, test, and launch the application each time they change its code.
Using a graphical interface, engineers can configure workflows for releases within the pipeline. CodePipeline also empowers engineers by allowing them to specify and execute actions or a set of actions, such as specifying which tests CodePipeline should execute and in which pre-production environments to execute them. The platform could then use parallel execution to speed delivery.
The AWS CD service integrates natively with various AWS services and supports custom plugins.
Additionally, it pulls source code from Amazon S3 and deploys it to AWS Elastic Beanstalk and AWS CodeDeploy. You can also integrate CodePipeline with AWS Lambda, Jenkins, and GitHub.
3. CI/CD Alternative: GitLab
Year Founded: 2011
Category: Source code management and CI/CD platform for GitOps
Best for: Teams who want GitOps and free, unlimited private repositories.
Pricing Model: Freemium, $19 per user per month (Premium), and $99 per user per month (Ultimate).
You do not have to install Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery separately with GitLab. GitLab’s main advantages, including over GitHub, is it offers superior audit management, a strong developer community, and other benefits. You can also use it Self-managed or SaaS.
GitLab is also ideally suited for companies searching for a Harnes.io alternative that focuses on security and compliance throughout the DevOps lifecycle.
4. CD Alternative: Octopus Deploy
Year Founded: 2012
Category: SaaS, on-premises, and cloud-native CD platform
Best for: Teams who want a Continuous Delivery tool that offers several powerful deployment strategy functions and can be integrated with most Continuous Integration platforms.
Pricing Model: Various
Octopus Deploy allows you to manage releases and automate deployments and operations runbooks. It also enables teams to deploy in a number of ways; by environment definition, API keys, service principals, permissions, connection strings, automatic logic, and reusing configuration variables.
Octopus Deploy is compatible with a wide variety of source control systems and current build server to streamline your CI/CD process.
5. Argo CD
Category: GitOps Continuous Delivery service for Kubernetes
Best for: Enterprises seeking a robust DC platform for Kubernetes that works with Git repositories.
Pricing Model: Open-source
Argo CD is an open-source platform for automating Kubernetes deployments, SDLC management, and Kubernetes RBAC. This is one of three tools Argo CD provides. The other two tools are Rollouts and Events. In Argo Workflows, teams have access to its “open-source container-native workflow engine” for orchestrating parallel jobs on Kubernetes.
Additionally, the declarative solution is only available on-premises, does not solve for continuous integration (CI), but is powerful for experienced engineers. It uses a Git repository to keep track of code changes.
Achieve Continuous Software Delivery With Cost Confidence
CloudZero goes beyond right-sizing instances and telling you what Reserved Instances or Savings Plans to buy. Our partner, ProsperOps, can be the best Harness cost management alternative for that.
Yet, with CloudZero, your business can accurately align costs to the people, products, and processes that generate them continuously. You can identify what’s driving your cloud costs in real-time throughout your CI/CD pipeline in AWS, Kubernetes, and Snowflake.
It doesn’t matter if your tags are messy. CloudZero does not use endless tagging to provide accurate insights about your cloud costs. Our cloud cost intelligence approach will still help you gather cost insights on tagged, untagged, untaggable, and shared resources in multitenant environments.
This means that you can determine where to pull strings to optimize your cloud spend without compromising your engineering velocity or killing innovation. 
to increase your visibility into the cost implications of architectural decisions.
The Modern Guide To Managing Cloud Costs
Traditional cost management is broken. Here's how to fix it.
