The Forrester Wave™: DevOps Platforms, Q2 2025

DevOps Platforms Vendor Product Comparisons 2025

Key features and pros and cons of top DevOps Platforms products:

Atlassian - Leaders

Pros:

Strong developer experience with Compass internal developer portal (IDP) and provision of feedback to developers through Jira and Jira Product Discovery
Excellent platform cohesion with AI context sharing through the Rovo product
Justly known for project planning and alignment capabilities
Customers praised Atlassian's dashboards, which allow managers to take pertinent information to the C-level

Cons:

Deployment platform support is average, with most effort catering to cloud-native developers
Lacked a readiness report generator, unlike other Forrester Wave participants
Customers felt responsiveness to feature requests suffered under a huge backlog
License renewals could be messy in part due to price, with Atlassian Server customers recently facing a mandatory migration
Adopting Atlassian's tools can be confusing — after Jira and Confluence, seeing when to bring the rest of the tools on, or if all are needed, can be hard

GitLab - Leaders

Pros:

Strong day-zero experience, especially for GitLab Cloud, needs no integration — everything is ready to run out of the box
Migration tools are extensive and include video tutorials
Strong developer tooling with Amazon Q SKU along with Duo products, a cloud development environment (CDE), IDP, and wikis for documentation
Project planning and alignment scored high, with a strong compliance center and good metrics
Garnered a top score for build automation and CI with multistage build pipelines and strong self-hosted support
Customers liked the fact that GitLab had a monthly release cadence with regular feature deliveries that allowed them to be nimble

Cons:

Innovation is solid but lags other Leaders' — the GitLab CI/CD marketplace started in 2023
Customers felt that a single license class didn't accurately represent the different usage by developers and managers

Harness - Leaders

Pros:

Innovative features like Database DevOps are ahead of most competitors
Vision of AI throughout the SDLC, a focus on security, and cloud cost self-service tools bring a strong mix of business value and developer experience
Excellent developer tooling, including an IDP and a CDE
Data analytics and reporting were first-rate, including great developer metrics as well as cloud costs and business alignment
Customers felt they got the excellent attention they needed and had more influence on the roadmap than they might have had with a larger vendor
Even smaller-sized organizations appreciated having direct access to the CEO

Cons:

Recent reinvigoration of its partner program may prime it for growth but needs to prove itself
Harness' smaller size makes its community less populous than many
On par for supported deployment platforms because much of the support is by documentation
Some customers had concerns that the model might not survive as Harness grows

Microsoft - Leaders

Pros:

Particular strength in supported deployment platforms with GitHub Actions and Microsoft's hosted MacOS runners providing sophisticated options to deploy to app stores
Azure DevOps helped Microsoft score well in platform testing as well as policy and governance
Strong in AI infusion (although some of Microsoft's Copilot technology is still in public preview and was excluded from the evaluation)
Robust partner ecosystem and a relatively transparent pricing strategy
Customers were happy with GitHub hosted runners and thought Microsoft and GitHub had better aligned

Cons:

First-party mainframe options are surprisingly light
Average in platform cohesion
GitHub alone is still light on testing and policy/governance capabilities
Community might almost be too big — the GitHub forums are strong but subject to more noise than most
Customers using GitHub without Azure DevOps noted that GitHub's enterprise capabilities were gradually getting up to par

Amazon Web Services - Strong Performers

Pros:

Scored very well on AI risk mitigation, where Amazon Bedrock forms the foundation
Strong partner ecosystem, partnering with many of its competitors in the DevOps space
Customers thought Amazon communicates well and fulfills promises
Customers praised Amazon's course materials
Impressive focus area on code transformation

Cons:

Few security tools are directly incorporated — most come through a partnership with Mend.io
Pipeline security is a separate product
Few deployment platforms are supported; for those that are, they're well supported in AWS but not among other cloud vendors
Migration instructions from other platforms are provided without tools
Amazon Q Developer features are currently hosted only in the west of the US (Oregon region), which may deter buyers with data residency requirements
Pricing is relatively transparent, but some features that other DevOps platforms provide out of the box are additional SKUs
Unclear is how CodeCatalyst fits, compared with the existing CodeBuild, CodePipeline, and CodeDeploy products
Amazon web console was seen less favorably by customers

Google Cloud - Strong Performers

Pros:

Software-bill-of-materials capabilities brought it to the top of pipeline security
Can run builds in ephemeral environments, which can save on cloud costs
First-party security and monitoring tools are available out of the box
Customers praised Google's rock-solid stability and extensive training materials
Extensive partner program

Cons:

Average day-zero experience consists of enabling the API, installing the CLI, and adding permissions
First-party security and monitoring tools require additional expense
Average deployment strategy includes canary but not blue/green
Weak on supported platforms, with focus (naturally) on Google Cloud, but supports Docker and Android builds (despite the latter feeling like a proof of concept)
Google has been innovating with its Gemini AI but has not made significant use of it in Cloud Build
Customers found that staying informed about changes and new features was hard
Changing partner program requirements can induce whiplash

Red Hat - Strong Performers

Pros:

Strong in platform administration and management with a good RBAC system and federated ID management, along with a command-line interface (CLI) for scripting when necessary
Support for third-party tools is another advantage
Supported platforms were a strength, extending to IBM mainframes as well as edge and cloud
Customers praised OpenShift's open-source nature, its stability, and its maturity
Partnership with cloud providers means pricing is transparent
Vision unifies a suite of more than 50 open-source tools in a single platform alongside some innovative cloud cost management tools
OpenShift frees enterprises from doing the integration themselves, and much of it is contributed back to open-source projects

Cons:

AI infusion lagged, with little support for developers and operators in a context-aware chat
Policy and governance were weak, with many capabilities in Advanced Cluster Security (in tech preview and not evaluated)
Red Hat has few integrated testing capabilities
Weak in online community building, where dead links trap those wanting to join its Slack community
Customers identified problems with enablement and a challenging level-one support tier that was difficult for DevOps professionals to get past

CircleCI - Contenders

Pros:

Above-average support for build automation and CI, with options for local and cloud builds in the same pipeline
Scored well in environment management with features to reduce unnecessary compute
Scored well in platform cohesion, with strong API/UI parity including audit capabilities
Solid on pricing flexibility with a token system and subscriptions
Customers liked that they could buy CircleCI tokens through the AWS marketplace

Cons:

Weak on developer tooling, with little to aid developers except a VS Code extension and an AI chatbot
Security is not at the forefront, with pipeline security and third-party security tools not available out of the box, although some plug-ins exist for third-party artifact registries
Innovation was weak: Although it has some AI integration, it lags competitors
Partner ecosystem is on par, though some integrations point at parked/dead domains
Online community is active but hosts few in-person events
Some customers looked for better utilization statistics to discover where the money went
Some customers had concerns about security because CircleCI suffered an incident in 2023 when customers were required to rotate secrets

CloudBees - Contenders

Pros:

Strong environment management with extensive automation
Jenkins has a strong community with a lot of vendors
Customers are generally happy with CloudBees
CloudBees is committed to Jenkins with innovation driven by customer requirements

Cons:

AI risk mitigation scored low, although CloudBees' use of AI is limited at this point
Even though CloudBees supports infrastructure as code via the command line, it does not provide out-of-the-box integration beyond that
Does not implement strong day-two operations: Observability, root cause analysis, cloud costs, and incident response require other tools
Vision of an open-source flexible single pane of glass makes CloudBees seem a little dated, compared with others
CloudBees is more hesitant about genAI than most vendors: Its vision includes only cautious use of it as opposed to moving quickly to AI agents
Roadmap focuses less on AI than on security
Customers mentioned concerns despite CloudBees offering high-availability options
Some customers complained about the lack of APIs and how that might result in vendor lock-in

IBM - Contenders

Pros:

Strong in testing capabilities with an AI-assisted framework
Strong on project planning/alignment with a readiness report and visualization tools to keep managers and executives informed
Day-two operations were mixed but included above-par incident response
Customers praised IBM's professional services when onboarding
Roadmap is solid and one of the few to include quantum computing

Cons:

Top-down approach doesn't help developers understand how they add business value
Day-two operations had little monitoring capability
Platform cohesion was an issue: IBM DevOps Automation is clearly composed of multiple modules
IBM has yet to integrate DevOps Build into the shared UI
Pricing transparency is poor, and the IBM product website does not include the product by name
Overall innovation was weak despite a few advanced visualizations and test capabilities
References to UrbanCode, an earlier DevOps platform, on the IBM DevOps Automation web pages may confuse customers
Online DevOps automation community is small, with a few posts a month
Customers mentioned challenges with access control — they are eager to have full single sign-on support
Customers noted an issue with security updates

Octopus Deploy - Contenders

Pros:

On par with infrastructure as code and platform administration and management
Blue/green and canary rollouts are available
Pricing flexibility and transparency are solid
For its size, the community is on par
Reference customers were very favorable to Octopus Deploy, saying they had excellent relationships and easy access to the CEO
Roadmap includes blueprints and guardrails, putting it on par with most of its competition

Cons:

Suffers from what isn't included: Project planning is absent, as is dashboard customization
UI support for deployment is limited — users must sometimes implement their own scripts and naming conventions
Third-party platforms promise iOS capabilities (a hosted MacOS runner is in alpha, so it was not evaluated)
SBOM generation documentation leads to Octopus Workflow Builder, an experiment that has moved to the roadmap but is not yet available
Partner ecosystem is weak
Innovation consisted of an on-par Copilot extension
Pricing is separate for adopters of both Codefresh and Octopus Deploy
Most customers used Octopus Deploy for deployment only, choosing another platform for CI

FAQs

Q: Which vendors are Leaders in 2025?

A: Atlassian, GitLab, Harness, Microsoft

Q: What does "Leader" mean in Forrester Wave terms?

A: Leaders are vendors that demonstrate strong current offerings and strategy. They have a clear vision for the market, invest in innovation, maintain robust partner ecosystems, and deliver comprehensive DevOps platform capabilities that satisfy the needs of enterprise customers across the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Leaders typically score well in both current offering and strategy dimensions of the evaluation.

Q: How do I interpret a Forrester Wave?

A: https://www.forrester.com/policies/forrester-wave-methodology/

Report:

Top Vendor Products for DevOps Platforms in 2025

DevOps Platforms Vendor Product Comparisons 2025

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FAQs

Q: Which vendors are Leaders in 2025?

Q: What does "Leader" mean in Forrester Wave terms?

Q: How do I interpret a Forrester Wave?

Reference