head to head · open source
Harness vs swiftwave
Harness has 38,798 GitHub stars, 3,451 forks, 106 open issues and last shipped yesterday. swiftwave has 909 stars, 65 forks, 28 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. Harness leads on adoption by 4,168% (38,798 vs 909 stars). Harness is written in Go under Apache-2.0; swiftwave is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Harness has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, swiftwave 7%. Harness was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (docker), 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 | swiftwave | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 39K | ★ 909 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-29 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 65 |
| 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 swiftwave if
- You want the swiftwave feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and swiftwave 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 swiftwave
SwiftWave is a self hosted, lightweight PaaS solution for easily deploying and managing your applications on any server 🚀. It's an open source alternative to Heroku, Netlify, and Render. You can install swiftwave in bare metal, Raspberry Pi, in any VPS(Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Linode, AWS, GCP etc.). Swiftwave and its dependencies are compatible with AMD64, ARM64 and ARMv7 architectures and compatible with Debian/Ubuntu/Raspbian OS/Fedora/CentOS/AlmaLinux/RockyLinux etc. Checkout swiftwave.org to explore more Why Swiftwave ? If you like to know why Swiftwave created and what is special in it, check this…
read the full swiftwave overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Harness or swiftwave more popular?
Harness has 38,798 GitHub stars and swiftwave has 909. Harness has the larger community by that measure.
Are Harness and swiftwave free?
Both are open source. Harness is licensed under Apache-2.0 and swiftwave under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Harness and swiftwave?
Harness is written in Go and swiftwave 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 swiftwave?
Choose Harness if you want the larger community (38,798 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose swiftwave if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.