Overview of Harness

Harness is a modern software delivery platform that simplifies and streamlines the developer experience. It leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to automate and optimize various stages of the software delivery lifecycle, enabling development teams to focus on writing code and delivering value to their customers. Harness provides a comprehensive suite of tools and integrations, including:

• Continuous integration

• Continuous delivery

• Feature flags

• Infrastructure provisioning

• Cloud cost management

By using Harness, organizations can improve their development processes, reduce downtime, and accelerate time-to-market. The platform has quickly gained traction among leading companies such as Citi, United Airlines, Ancestry, and Ulta Beauty.

Harness offers a flexible pricing model based on the number of developers using their platform, with a free tier and enterprise plans available. The free plan includes access to platform capabilities, AI features like AIDA, continuous verification, and test intelligence, as well as developer experience features like Git integration and out-of-the-box templates.

Bottom Line: Harness is a tool that's well-suited for organizations looking to streamline their software delivery processes and leverage AI-powered automation. However, it may not be the most cost-effective solution for smaller teams or those with simpler requirements.

Alternative #1: Statsig

Statsig is an advanced data platform designed for technical teams. It offers a comprehensive suite of tools, including feature flags, product analytics, A/B testing, web analytics, and session replay. Statsig excels at scaling with customers' experimentation needs, making it suitable for startups and enterprises alike.

Statsig's key features include:

• Release automation and scheduled progressive rollouts

• Advanced stats engine with treatments like CUPED, stratified sampling, and switchback tests

• Bundled products for a seamless user experience

Statsig is an excellent choice for teams that value a scalable, affordable, and technically sophisticated solution. The company provides exceptional customer support, with dedicated engineers working directly with customers. Statsig's transparent, usage-based pricing is highly competitive, offering a generous free tier and significant volume discounts for enterprise customers.

What sets Statsig apart is its focus on experimentation and data. The platform is designed to cater to the needs of technical teams, providing them with the tools and insights they need to make data-driven decisions. Statsig's advanced experimentation capabilities and extensive analytics features make it a top choice for companies looking to optimize their products and drive growth.

Bottom Line: Statsig is a powerful experimentation and analytics platform that caters to the needs of technical teams. While it may not be the best fit for non-technical users or those without engineering resources, it offers unparalleled capabilities for companies focused on building and optimizing software products.

Alternative #2: Fullstory

Fullstory is a behavioral data analytics company that helps businesses gain a comprehensive understanding of their customers' experiences. By capturing hundreds of events and signals, Fullstory enables companies to surface user sentiment and take action based on the implied sentiment behind every user action. This allows businesses to build predictive models, train AI, analyze user behavioral data, and watch real-time session replays to improve user experiences.

Fullstory's platform offers a range of features and solutions, including:

• Data Direct for syncing behavioral data to a company's data warehouse

• Product Analytics for analyzing user behavior and taking action

• Session Replay for watching real-time user sessions and identifying areas for improvement

The company also provides solutions tailored to specific roles, such as Product Managers, Engineering teams, and Data Teams, as well as industries like Retail \u0026 Ecommerce, Travel \u0026 Hospitality, Finance \u0026 Insurance, SaaS, Gaming, and Food \u0026 Beverage.

With Fullstory, businesses can introduce user-specific discounts, identify signals of intent and frustration, and detect and deter bad actors in real-time. By leveraging behavioral data, companies can increase conversion rates, improve profitability, build customer loyalty, and minimize costs associated with fraud. Fullstory's platform helps businesses gain a more complete picture of their customers, enabling them to build better personalization that is helpful, timely, revenue-driving, and cost-efficient.

Fullstory offers a variety of pricing plans to cater to the needs of different teams and organizations. Their pricing model is based on the volume of sessions captured and the features included in each plan. The plans range from a free option with limited sessions and features to enterprise-level plans with advanced capabilities and customization options.

Bottom Line: Fullstory is a powerful tool for businesses looking to understand and optimize their customers' digital experiences. However, it focuses primarily on behavioral data analytics and may not provide the same level of feature management and delivery capabilities as Harness.

Alternative #3: Flagsmith

Flagsmith is an open-source feature flagging and remote configuration platform. It enables developers to manage feature flags across multiple platforms and environments. Flagsmith provides granular targeting, A/B testing capabilities, and remote configuration management.

Key features of Flagsmith include:

• Cross-platform support for web, mobile, and server-side applications

• Granular targeting based on user attributes, segments, and custom rules

• A/B testing and experimentation capabilities

• Remote configuration management for dynamic app settings

Flagsmith offers control, security, and flexible deployment options. You can self-host Flagsmith or use their managed cloud service. Their pricing is tiered based on the number of feature flag requests, with both free and enterprise plans available.

The key difference between Flagsmith and other feature management platforms is its open-source nature and focus on feature flags and configuration. While it may lack some of the advanced experimentation and analytics capabilities of other platforms, Flagsmith provides a solid foundation for feature flagging and remote configuration.

Bottom Line: Flagsmith is a tool that's well-suited for developers who prioritize control, security, and flexibility in their feature flagging and configuration management. However, it may have some limitations in terms of advanced experimentation and analytics features compared to other platforms.

Alternative #4: LaunchDarkly

LaunchDarkly is a feature management and experimentation platform that enables development teams to decouple feature rollout from code deployment. By separating these processes, LaunchDarkly allows for greater control and flexibility in releasing new features to users. The platform provides a comprehensive set of tools for managing feature flags, targeting specific user segments, and monitoring the performance of released features.

Key features of LaunchDarkly include:

• Release automation: Streamline the feature release process with automated rollouts and rollbacks

• Targeting: Deliver features to specific users, groups, or segments based on custom attributes

• Remediation: Quickly disable problematic features without redeploying code

• Experimentation: Run A/B tests and experiments to optimize feature performance and user experience

LaunchDarkly helps organizations streamline their software delivery process by reducing the risk associated with deploying new features. By enabling gradual rollouts and targeted releases, teams can gather valuable feedback and make data-driven decisions before releasing features to the entire user base. This approach allows for faster iteration and optimization of the customer experience.

LaunchDarkly's pricing model is based on the number of service connections and contexts used within the platform. Service connections refer to the number of unique services or applications integrated with LaunchDarkly, while contexts represent the number of unique user segments or environments managed within the platform. This pricing structure allows organizations to scale their usage of LaunchDarkly as their needs grow.

One key difference between LaunchDarkly and other feature management platforms is its strong focus on feature flags and experimentation. While platforms like Harness offer a broader set of DevOps tools, LaunchDarkly specializes in providing a robust and user-friendly solution for managing feature releases and optimizing the customer experience through data-driven experimentation.

Bottom Line: LaunchDarkly is a tool that's well-suited for development teams looking to streamline their feature release process and optimize the customer experience through experimentation. However, it may not be the best fit for organizations seeking a more comprehensive DevOps solution.