head to head · open source
Harness vs phing
Harness has 38,798 GitHub stars, 3,451 forks, 106 open issues and last shipped yesterday. phing has 1,163 stars, 318 forks, 6 open issues and last shipped 8 days ago. Harness leads on adoption by 3,236% (38,798 vs 1,163 stars). Harness is written in Go under Apache-2.0; phing is written in PHP under LGPL-3.0. Harness has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, phing 27%. Harness was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (build-automation), 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 | phing | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 39K | ★ 1.2K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | LGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-26 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 318 |
| 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 phing if
- You want the phing feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the LGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and phing 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 phing
Thank you for using PHING! PH ing I s N ot G NU make; it's a PHP project build system or build tool based on Apache Ant. You can do anything with it that you could do with a traditional build system like GNU make, and its use of simple XML build files and extensible PHP "task" classes make it an easy to use and highly flexible build framework. Features include running PHPUnit unit tests (including test result and coverage reports), file transformations (e.g. token replacement, XSLT transformation, template transformations), file system operations, interactive build support, SQL execution, SCM operations (Git…
read the full phing overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Harness or phing more popular?
Harness has 38,798 GitHub stars and phing has 1,163. Harness has the larger community by that measure.
Are Harness and phing free?
Both are open source. Harness is licensed under Apache-2.0 and phing under LGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Harness and phing?
Harness is written in Go and phing in PHP. 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 phing?
Choose Harness if you want the larger community (38,798 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose phing if its feature set, stack or LGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.