head to head · open source
Harness vs captain
Harness has 38,785 GitHub stars, 3,451 forks, 106 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. captain has 775 stars, 48 forks, 20 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. Harness leads on adoption by 4,905% (38,785 vs 775 stars). Harness is written in Go under Apache-2.0; captain is written in Go under MIT. Harness has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, captain 6%. Harness was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (ci, docker, git), 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.
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Side by side
| Harness | captain | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 39K | ★ 775 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-30 | 2026-09-23 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 48 |
| 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
pick captain if
- You want the captain feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and captain fits your workflow better
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 captain
Introduction Captain Convert your Git workflow to Docker containers ready for Continuous Delivery Define your workflow in the captain.yaml and use captain to your Continuous Delivery service to create containers for each commit, test them and push them to your registry only when tests passes. Use captain build to build your Dockerfile(s) of your repository. If your repository has local changes the containers will only be tagged as latest , otherwise the containers will be tagged as latest , COMMIT ID & BRANCH NAME . Now your Git commit tree is reproduced in your local docker repository. Use captain test to run…
read the full captain overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Harness or captain more popular?
Harness has 38,785 GitHub stars and captain has 775. Harness has the larger community by that measure.
Are Harness and captain free?
Both are open source. Harness is licensed under Apache-2.0 and captain under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Harness and captain?
Harness is written in Go and captain in Go. 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 captain?
Choose Harness if you want the larger community (38,785 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose captain if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.