Harness Open Source is the name of the open source project at github.com/harness/harness. Its README describes it as “an open source development platform packed with the power of code hosting, automated DevOps pipelines, hosted development environments (Gitspaces), and artifact registries”.[2] It is distributed as a Docker image that a user runs locally or on their own infrastructure, with data stored in a volume the user manages.[2] The README states: “Harness Open Source represents a massive investment in the next generation of Drone”, adding source hosting, developer environments and artifact registries to what Drone provided for continuous integration.[2] It is separate from the commercial Harness Platform that is sold under the Subscription Terms, although the Harness pricing page lists it as included in the Free plan.[4]
Editions
| Edition | Licence or terms | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Harness Open Source | Apache License 2.0[1][2] | Self-managed; free of charge |
| Free plan | Subscription Terms; “Harness Open Source included”, “Litmus Chaos included”, “Community support”[4] | Hosted platform with limits |
| Essentials plan | Subscription Terms | All-in-one bundle; no on-premises support[4] |
| Enterprise plan | Subscription Terms | Mix-and-match modules; Self Managed Platform available as an add-on[4] |
| Self-Managed Enterprise Edition | Subscription Terms plus licence keys | On-premises installation[6][7] |
| CD Community Edition | Retired | Replaced by Harness Open Source[3] |
The Community Edition position is explicit. Harness says “Harness CD Community Edition (CE) is retired in favor of Harness Open Source”, and describes two free options for CD: a free SaaS plan, recommended for new users, and Harness Open Source for a self-managed option. A user can move to a paid plan from Account Settings, Subscriptions, or through Harness Sales.[3] Catalog rows: Harness Open Source, Free plan, Self-Managed Enterprise Edition and the rule Harness CD Community Edition is retired in favour of Harness Open Source.
Metrics
Harness Open Source has no licence metric: the Apache License 2.0 grants rights without counting users, hosts or instances. The Free plan of the hosted platform has platform limits instead: the resource limits table gives Free accounts 1 organization, 100 projects and 100 users, against 1 organization, 12,500 projects and 500 users for Essentials and 5,000 organizations and 90,000 users for Enterprise. These are default limits, not hard restrictions, and support can adjust them.[10] Free plan modules have their own allowances: 2000 Cloud Credits a month, 1,000 HSUs a month, and 10 GB of Code Repository storage with 50 GB of monthly bandwidth.[13][14][12] Details are in Harness Cloud credits, Flex Pricing and overage.
Counting / floors
Open source licence terms. The LICENSE file is the Apache License, Version 2.0, January 2004.[1] The licence grants each recipient a “perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license” to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display and perform, sublicense and distribute the work in source or object form, and a corresponding patent licence that terminates if the recipient starts patent litigation alleging that the work infringes a patent.[1] A recipient who redistributes the work must give others a copy of the licence, mark modified files and retain copyright, patent, trademark and attribution notices.[1] The work is provided as is, without warranties of any kind, and contributors disclaim liability for damages arising from its use.[1] The rule row is Harness Open Source is licensed under the Apache License 2.0, with scope in Harness Open Source covers code hosting, pipelines, Gitspaces and artifact registries.
Free tiers of modules.
- Feature Flags lists a Free plan with up to 2 developers and 25,000 client monthly active users, a Team plan with up to 50 developers and 100,000 MAUs, and an Enterprise plan with unlimited developers and 1 million MAUs.[9]
- Cloud and AI Cost Management offers a no-commitment Free Forever plan for cloud spend up to USD 250,000 a year, with 2 Kubernetes clusters, 10 AutoStopping rules and 30 days of data visibility, and requires Enterprise above the threshold. The page gives the threshold as USD 250K per year in one place and per month in another.[8]
- Resilience Testing: LitmusChaos is a “CNCF-incubating, open-source chaos engineering project originally created by ChaosNative, which Harness later acquired”, and Harness Resilience Testing “is built on that same chaos engine”. The comparison table lists LitmusChaos as free and open source, and the commercial module with a free entry tier with capped experiment runs and paid tiers priced per service.[5]
Commercial self-managed edition. Self-Managed Enterprise Edition “is an on-premises solution that allows you to install and run Harness on your own infrastructure”. It needs “a valid Harness license key” and has two types: Next Generation (NG), “to enable the Core Platform and its modules on SMP”, and Looker, “to add analytics and dashboards features”. Licences are obtained from Harness Support.[6][7] Licence keys are placed in the Helm values file.[6] See Self-managed Harness needs a licence key (NG and Looker).
Virtualization & partitioning
The open source edition is not metered, so virtualization and partitioning do not arise. For the commercial self-managed edition, the licence is tied to the modules and limits encoded in the licence key; the documentation retrieved does not describe core, socket or host counting.[6] Considerations for virtual environments are in virtualization and partitioning.
Cloud / BYOL
The open source edition is by nature bring-your-own infrastructure. The commercial edition is available both hosted and self-managed. A customer moving from the hosted platform to Self-Managed Enterprise Edition needs a licence key from Harness, and the pricing page lists the self-managed platform as an add-on in the plan comparison, while stating that the DevOps Essentials package has no on-premises support.[4]
Programs
- Harness Open Source and retired Community Edition. The free self-managed option and the retirement of Community Edition.[3]
- Self-managed licence keys. NG and Looker keys.[6]
- Open source in distributed software. For commercial Software distributed to customers, “use of any Open Source is subject to the applicable Open Source license and not the license to Software”, to the extent that licence requires.[11] See Open source inside distributed Software follows its own licence.
- Trials and betas. Free or trial use of the commercial platform, and beta or early-access features, is evaluation only and may be limited, discontinued or converted to a paid module.[11]
Audits and compliance
For the open source project, compliance consists of meeting the Apache License conditions when redistributing the work: including the licence, noting changes and retaining notices.[1] For the commercial editions, the Subscription Terms apply, including the usage verification right described in Harness terms, support and compliance. Where an organization runs the open source edition and later buys a paid plan, the two are governed by different documents. The Subscription Terms say that a separate written licence agreement for a Module controls over them.[11]
Out of scope
- The history of the Drone project and its separate licence, which the Harness README refers to but which is not part of the harness/harness main branch.[2]
- Third-party dependencies of the open source repository, which carry their own licences.
- Prices for paid plans and the self-managed add-on, which Harness does not publish.