Comparison guides
These guides explain where Slipway is different, where it is the same, and where another tool may be the better choice. They are written from public documentation and our own understanding, and tools change. If something is out of date, tell us and we will fix it.
The short version
Section titled “The short version”| Harness | Octopus | GitHub Actions / CircleCI / Buildkite | Slipway | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pipelines (CI) | Yes | Weak (relies on others) | Yes | Yes, first-class |
| Deployment model (envs, releases, promotion, strategies) | Yes | Best in class | Weak / DIY | Yes, Octopus-grade |
| Canary with metric verification | Yes (paid) | No | No | Yes (Team+) |
| Approvals, gates, change mgmt | Enterprise | Yes | DIY | Team+ |
| Runners: self-hosted free, unlimited | Limited | Tentacles licensed by target | Mostly yes | Yes, unlimited, free |
| Pricing transparency | Poor | Per-target, climbs fast | Per-minute / per-user | Flat, published, no SSO tax |
| Self-host | Enterprise | Yes (paid) | Partial | Yes (source-available, free) |
| Pipeline-as-code + visual editor round-trip | Yes | Partial | No | Yes |
| Runs as a single binary | No | No | n/a | Yes |
Guides
Section titled “Guides”- Slipway vs Harness
- Slipway vs Octopus Deploy
- Slipway vs GitHub Actions
- Slipway vs GitLab CI
- Slipway vs CircleCI and Buildkite
Moving over? See the migration guides.
What Slipway is betting on
Section titled “What Slipway is betting on”- One model for build and deploy. Pipelines produce releases; releases move through environments with strategies, approvals and verification. No glue scripts between a CI tool and a deploy tool.
- A free tier a company can run on, with SSO, audit log, secrets and unlimited self-hosted runners included.
- Published, flat pricing per organisation, with unlimited users.
- Self-hostable, source-available, runnable as a single binary.
Where others win today
Section titled “Where others win today”Slipway is young. Be honest with yourself about these:
- Ecosystem. GitHub Actions has an enormous marketplace; Slipway’s step registry is new, though the compatibility shim aims to run most GitHub Actions unmodified (planned, phase 2).
- Maturity and scale references. Harness, Octopus, CircleCI and Buildkite have years of production history at very large customers.
- Feature depth in niches. Each incumbent has areas of depth (Harness’s chaos engineering and cost features, GitLab’s single application for code to security) that Slipway does not try to match.
- Hosted macOS and GPU runners come later for Slipway.