head to head · open source
Harness vs Rivet
Harness has 38,378 GitHub stars, 3,397 forks, 106 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Rivet has 6,144 stars, 249 forks, 269 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Harness leads on adoption by 525% (38,378 vs 6,144 stars). Harness is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Rivet is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Harness has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, Rivet 4%. Rivet 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 | Rivet | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 38K | ★ 6.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.4K | ⑂ 249 |
| 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 Rivet if
- You want the Rivet feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and Rivet 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 Rivet
Rivet is an open source runtime for building stateful backends around in memory actors. It is written in Rust and released under the Apache 2.0 license, and it lives in the developer tools ecosystem for build and deployment, with topics that place it alongside Cloudflare Durable Objects, FoundationDB, serverless platforms, and realtime multiplayer infrastructure. An actor in Rivet is a long running, lightweight process that holds its state in memory while persisting that state automatically, so a developer creates one actor per agent, per session, or per user rather than managing a separate service for each.…
read the full Rivet overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Harness or Rivet more popular?
Harness has 38,378 GitHub stars and Rivet has 6,144. Harness has the larger community by that measure.
Are Harness and Rivet free?
Both are open source. Harness is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Rivet under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Harness and Rivet?
Harness is written in Go and Rivet 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 Rivet?
Choose Harness if you want the larger community (38,378 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Rivet if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.