head to head · open source
Harness vs farm
Harness has 38,378 GitHub stars, 3,397 forks, 106 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. farm has 5,588 stars, 190 forks, 211 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. Harness leads on adoption by 587% (38,378 vs 5,588 stars). Harness is written in Go under Apache-2.0; farm is written in Rust under MIT. Harness has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, farm 3%. Harness was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | farm | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 38K | ★ 5.6K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-06-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.4K | ⑂ 190 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Harness if
- You weight community size — 38K 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 farm if
- You want the farm feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and farm fits your workflow better
About Harness
Harness Open Source is an Apache 2.0, Go based developer platform that combines Git source control management, CI/CD pipelines, Gitspaces hosted development environments and artifact registries into one self hostable system for engineering teams that want end to end software delivery without stitching four separate products together.
read the full Harness overview →
About farm
Farm is a web build tool written in Rust and distributed under the MIT license. It lives in the JavaScript and TypeScript frontend tooling ecosystem, where it sits alongside bundlers such as webpack and Vite, and it is designed to be compatible with Vite so that existing plugins can be reused. The project is hosted on GitHub, has reached a 1.0 stable release that the README describes as production ready, and ships with documentation and an online playground at farmfe.org.
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Frequently asked questions
Is Harness or farm more popular?
Harness has 38,378 GitHub stars and farm has 5,588. Harness has the larger community by that measure.
Are Harness and farm free?
Both are open source. Harness is licensed under Apache-2.0 and farm under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Harness and farm?
Harness is written in Go and farm in Rust. 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 farm?
Choose Harness if you want the larger community (38,378 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose farm if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.