head to head · open source
Harness vs tsuru
Harness has 38,798 GitHub stars, 3,451 forks, 106 open issues and last shipped yesterday. tsuru has 5,326 stars, 555 forks, 17 open issues and last shipped 13 days ago. Harness leads on adoption by 628% (38,798 vs 5,326 stars). Harness is written in Go under Apache-2.0; tsuru is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause. Harness has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, tsuru 10%. Harness was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (docker, go, hacktoberfest), 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 | tsuru | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 39K | ★ 5.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-21 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 555 |
| 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 tsuru if
- You want the tsuru feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and tsuru 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 tsuru
tsuru What is tsuru? tsuru is an extensible and open source Platform as a Service (PaaS) that makes application deployments faster and easier. With tsuru, you don’t need to think about servers at all. As an application developer, you can: Write apps in the programming language of your choice Back apps with add on resources such as SQL and NoSQL databases, including memcached, Redis, and many others Manage apps using the tsuru command line tool Links: Landing page: Full Documentation: How to Contribute: Repository & Issue Tracker: Talk to us on Gitter: Popular platforms supported: Python Nodejs GO Ruby PHP Perl…
read the full tsuru overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Harness or tsuru more popular?
Harness has 38,798 GitHub stars and tsuru has 5,326. Harness has the larger community by that measure.
Are Harness and tsuru free?
Both are open source. Harness is licensed under Apache-2.0 and tsuru under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Harness and tsuru?
Harness is written in Go and tsuru 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 tsuru?
Choose Harness if you want the larger community (38,798 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose tsuru if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.