head to head · open source
Harness vs skills
Harness has 38,798 GitHub stars, 3,451 forks, 106 open issues and last shipped yesterday. skills has 6,310 stars, 339 forks, 7 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. Harness leads on adoption by 515% (38,798 vs 6,310 stars). Harness is written in Go under Apache-2.0; skills is written in Python under MIT. Harness has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, skills 5%. 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 | skills | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 39K | ★ 6.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-08-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 339 |
| 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 skills if
- You want the skills feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and skills 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 skills
What can BrowserAct be used for? BrowserAct enables AI agents and teams to perform real browser automation, web data extraction, and account based workflows. It helps agents get past anti bot walls, hand off to humans across platforms when stuck, run parallel tasks without cross contamination, and isolate multiple accounts in independent browsers, backed by stealth fingerprints, TLS rotation, residential proxies, CAPTCHA solving, and stable fingerprint proxy setups for authenticated sessions. Two usage modes are available: fully cloud managed execution, or local browser control driven by your own agent workflow…
read the full skills overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Harness or skills more popular?
Harness has 38,798 GitHub stars and skills has 6,310. Harness has the larger community by that measure.
Are Harness and skills free?
Both are open source. Harness is licensed under Apache-2.0 and skills under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Harness and skills?
Harness is written in Go and skills in Python. 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 skills?
Choose Harness if you want the larger community (38,798 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose skills if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.