head to head · open source
Harness vs xc
Harness has 38,798 GitHub stars, 3,451 forks, 106 open issues and last shipped yesterday. xc has 1,412 stars, 37 forks, 17 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. Harness leads on adoption by 2,648% (38,798 vs 1,412 stars). Harness is written in Go under Apache-2.0; xc is written in Go under MIT. Harness has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, xc 3%. Harness was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (go), 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 | xc | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 39K | ★ 1.4K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 37 |
| 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 xc if
- You want the xc feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and xc 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 xc
xc Simple, Convenient, Docs based task runner. Docs Getting Started GitHub xc is a task runner similar to Make or npm run , that aims to be more discoverable and approachable. The problem xc is intended to solve is scripts maintained separately from their documentation. Often a Makefile or a package.json will contain some useful scripts for developing on a project, then the README.md will surface and describe these scripts. In such a case, since the documentation is separate, it may not be updated when scripts are changed or added. xc aims to solve this by defining the scripts inline with the documentation. xc…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Harness or xc more popular?
Harness has 38,798 GitHub stars and xc has 1,412. Harness has the larger community by that measure.
Are Harness and xc free?
Both are open source. Harness is licensed under Apache-2.0 and xc under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Harness and xc?
Harness is written in Go and xc 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 xc?
Choose Harness if you want the larger community (38,798 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose xc if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.