head to head · open source
Harness vs tsuru
Harness has 38,378 GitHub stars, 3,397 forks, 106 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. tsuru has 5,310 stars, 551 forks, 17 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Harness leads on adoption by 623% (38,378 vs 5,310 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 | ★ 38K | ★ 5.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.4K | ⑂ 551 |
| 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 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 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 tsuru
tsuru is an open source, extensible Platform as a Service written in Go and released under the BSD 3 Clause license. It lives in the cloud native and DevOps ecosystem alongside Docker, Kubernetes, and the wider container tooling world, and it has been developed in public for roughly fifteen years. Rather than asking developers to think about servers, tsuru presents a platform on which applications are deployed as units and managed through a single command line client. The project describes itself as extensible, which reflects a design where the set of supported runtimes and backing services can be grown rather th…
read the full tsuru overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Harness or tsuru more popular?
Harness has 38,378 GitHub stars and tsuru has 5,310. 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 (38,378 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.