Slipway vs Harness
Harness is a broad software delivery platform covering CI, CD, feature flags, cost management, chaos engineering and more. Slipway focuses on CI and CD and aims to do those two excellently, with a free tier and published pricing.
Where they overlap
Section titled “Where they overlap”Both offer pipelines as code, deployment to Kubernetes and clouds, canary and blue/green strategies, approvals and governance, secrets management, RBAC, and self-hosted execution agents (Harness delegates, Slipway runners).
Differences that matter
Section titled “Differences that matter”| Topic | Harness | Slipway |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | A wide platform of modules | CI and CD only; integrates with flags, scanners and observability tools instead of reimplementing them |
| Packaging | Multiple services; self-managed is an enterprise offering | One binary (server, scheduler, worker, runner), plus Postgres, NATS, S3 and Valkey. Self-hosting free |
| Pricing | Module-based with developer and service licensing; quote-driven at higher tiers | Per organisation, flat, published: Free, Team $49, Business $299; unlimited users |
| Canary verification | Available on paid tiers | Team and above, with Prometheus, Datadog, New Relic, CloudWatch and Google Cloud Monitoring, including baseline comparison and significance testing |
| Runner model | Delegates dial out | Runners dial out; unlimited and free on every plan |
| Pipeline syntax | YAML with a visual editor | YAML with CEL expressions; a visual editor that round-trips YAML is planned |
| Governance | OPA-based policy as code | CEL policy gates (3 on Free, unlimited on Team+); external OPA planned |
| SSO | Plan-dependent | OIDC SSO on every plan |
Concept mapping
Section titled “Concept mapping”| Harness | Slipway |
|---|---|
| Account, Org, Project | Organisation, Project |
| Pipeline, Stage, Step | Pipeline, Stage, Job, Step |
| Service | Service |
| Environment, Infrastructure Definition | Environment, Infrastructure |
| Delegate | Runner (in a runner pool) |
| Connector | Integration |
| Secret manager, secrets | Secrets with external references |
| Approval step | Approval and gates on the environment |
| Continuous Verification | Canary verification |
| Templates | Org templates (versioned, immutable) |
Step-by-step: Migrate from Harness.
Choose Harness when
Section titled “Choose Harness when”You want one vendor for the whole delivery lifecycle including cost management, chaos engineering and an integrated feature-flag product, and procurement favours a single enterprise platform.
Choose Slipway when
Section titled “Choose Slipway when”You want CI and CD in one clean model with transparent pricing, a free tier you can run on, easy self-hosting, and unlimited users and runners.