head to head · open source

Harness vs cake

Harness has 38,798 GitHub stars, 3,451 forks, 106 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cake has 4,200 stars, 779 forks, 247 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Harness leads on adoption by 824% (38,798 vs 4,200 stars). Harness is written in Go under Apache-2.0; cake is written in C# under MIT. Harness has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, cake 19%. Harness was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (build-automation, continuous-integration, hacktoberfest), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.

Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.

Harness ★ 39K cake ★ 4.2K category Developer Tools

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Side by side

	Harness	cake
GitHub stars	★ 39K	★ 4.2K
License	Apache-2.0	MIT
Written in	Go	C#
Last push	2026-11-02	2026-10-30
Forks	⑂ 3.5K	⑂ 779
Self-hosting	Yes	Yes
Data ownership	Your server	Your server

pick Harness if

You weight community size — 39K stars and counting
You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
Your stack matches Go
You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance

full Harness profile →

pick cake if

You want the cake feature set and don't need the biggest community
You prefer the MIT license terms
Your stack matches C#
You evaluated both and cake fits your workflow better

full cake profile →

About Harness

Harness Harness Open Source is an open source development platform packed with the power of code hosting, automated DevOps pipelines, hosted development environments (Gitspaces), and artifact registries. Overview Harness Open source is an open source development platform packed with the power of code hosting, automated DevOps pipelines, Gitspaces, and artifact registries. Running Harness locally The latest publicly released docker image can be found on harness/harness. To install Harness yourself, simply run the command below. Once the container is up, you can visit in your browser. The Harness image uses a…

read the full Harness overview →

About cake

Cake Cake (C Make) is a build automation system with a C DSL to do things like compiling code, copy files/folders, running unit tests, compress files and build NuGet packages. Continuous integration GitHub Windows / Ubuntu/ macOS [![Build Status](

read the full cake overview →

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Frequently asked questions

Is Harness or cake more popular?

Harness has 38,798 GitHub stars and cake has 4,200. Harness has the larger community by that measure.

Are Harness and cake free?

Both are open source. Harness is licensed under Apache-2.0 and cake under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.

What is the difference between Harness and cake?

Harness is written in Go and cake in C#. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.

Which should I choose, Harness or cake?

Choose Harness if you want the larger community (38,798 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose cake if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.