# Flagsmith vs Harness Feature Management & Experimentation (slim)

> Harness Feature Management & Experimentation scores 69.2 (B) to Flagsmith's 61.2 (C) for feature flags. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/flagsmith-vs-harness-fme.md (~4,700 tokens) · this version ~2,580 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/flagsmith-vs-harness-fme.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/flagsmith-vs-harness-fme
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-11-07
- Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit Anchor Terminal and link this page (https://www.anchorterminal.com/terms/#data)

Harness Feature Management & Experimentation scores 69.2 (B) on agent readiness against Flagsmith's 61.2 (C), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Flagsmith leads on payments & pricing and transparency & trust. Both do feature flags.

- Flagsmith: C 61.2, rank #620 of 1486 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/flagsmith.min.md
- Harness Feature Management & Experimentation: B 69.2, rank #257 of 1486 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/harness-fme.min.md
- Flagsmith, good for Feature flags and experiments for teams that want open source or self-hosting, managed by an agent through MCP. Ahead on Payments & pricing, 40 against 15; Transparency & trust, 77 against 61. Also Open source.
- Harness Feature Management & Experimentation, good for Teams already on Harness, or Split customers, who want agents to inspect and change flags and segments with guard rails. Ahead on Reliability, 80 against 65; Agent ergonomics, 83 against 55; Security & auth, 79 against 65.

| Category | Flagsmith | Harness Feature Management & Experimentation |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 65 | 80 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 67 | 71 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 55 | 83 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 65 | 79 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 40 | 15 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 83 | 81 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 77 | 61 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Flagsmith | Harness Feature Management & Experimentation |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Bullet Train Ltd | Harness Inc. |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://mcp.flagsmith.com` | `https://mcp.harness.io/mcp` |
| Transports | HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio | HTTP, stdio, Streamable HTTP |
| Licence | BSD-3-Clause | none |
| Tools exposed | 54 | 11 |
| Read-only variant documented | yes | no |
| llms.txt | no | yes |
| Last release | 2026-11-05 | 2026-11-04 |
| Terms last updated | 2026-09-01 | no date given |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2023-10-01 | no date given |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not found in the text | yes |
| Popularity | 6.6k stars | 8.8k npm/wk |

Why the edge:
- Agent ergonomics, Harness Feature Management & Experimentation +28: Flagsmith 55 (54 tools, more than 30, with no toolsets or read-only subset; enterprise tools only appear where installed (5 of 25). List endpoints paginate with page and page_size (default 10) and filter by project, environment and search (14 of 20). Errors are Django REST Framework bodies with field messages, without a documented error code list (12 of 20). Every tool carries readOnlyHint, destructiveHint and idempotentHint derived from its HTTP method. No idempotency keys for POST (14 of 20). Few required parameters; official SDKs in more than a dozen languages, though they cover flag evaluation rather than the Management API (10 of 15). 5+14+12+14+10 = 55.); Harness Feature Management & Experimentation 83 (11 consolidated tools, and `--toolsets=fme` narrows the server to FME (25). Flag lists filter server-side by name, tag and rollout status, and the Admin API paginates with markerLimit (17 of 20). Documented status codes, 429 headers, and a harness_diagnose tool. Error bodies aren't documented per endpoint (14 of 20). harness_list and harness_get carry readOnlyHint, write tools ask for confirmation by elicitation, and harness_delete is marked destructive. No idempotency keys (15 of 20). Two required settings (API key, optional org and project, account ID read from the token); a Python Admin API wrapper and CLI, and SDKs in more than a dozen languages for evaluation (12 of 15). 25+17+14+15+12 = 83.)
- Payments & pricing, Flagsmith +25: Flagsmith 40 (No x402, MPP or L402 (0). Plan prices and the per-million overage are public without login, though the page gives two overage rates for Start-Up ($50 per million and $7 per 100,000) (20). A $0 Free plan with 50,000 requests a month and a free BSD-3-Clause self-hosted edition. The pricing page doesn't say whether a card is needed, but the Free plan has no charge and the self-hosted edition needs no account (20). A person signs up in a browser, then approves OAuth or creates a key (0). 0+20+20+0 = 40.); Harness Feature Management & Experimentation 15 (No x402, MPP or L402 (0). No FME prices are published; harness.io/pricing lists FME only under Enterprise, priced by quotation (0). The docs describe a Start FME Free Plan step inside a Harness account; its limits and whether a card is needed aren't stated (15 of 20). A person signs up for Harness in a browser and creates a key or token (0). 0+0+15+0 = 15.)
- Transparency & trust, Flagsmith +16: Flagsmith 77 (BSD-3-Clause for the core and the MCP server; the about page says most of the product is under that licence and some CI runs with private packages, so not every Cloud feature is in the open repository (25 of 30). The terms set Flagsmith as processor with 48-hour breach notice and EEA transfer rules, and the sub-processor list is dated 13 October 2025. The privacy policy dates from October 2023 and states no retention periods (16 of 30). The Gram-hosted MCP server was retired with a dated notice (30 June 2026), and three spec operations are marked deprecated, without a stated deprecation policy (10 of 20). The sub-processor list names providers and their countries (16 of 20). 25+16+10+16 = 67.); Harness Feature Management & Experimentation 61 (A closed service under Harness's subscription terms; the MCP server is MIT (18 of 30). The privacy statement covers website and sales data and defers customer data to the customer agreement and a published DPA; retention periods for customer data weren't found (18 of 30). A versioning policy for SDKs with support windows, and Split-era API endpoints marked deprecated with migration guides (14 of 20). Sub-processors are on the trust centre, which we didn't read, and the security page doesn't name data locations (10 of 20). 18+18+14+10 = 60.)
- Reliability, Harness Feature Management & Experimentation +15: Flagsmith 65 (Graded on Flagsmith Cloud with the hosted lines. Statuspage at status.flagsmith.com with components for the Edge API, Admin API, dashboard and website (20). In the 90 days from 8 August, an Admin and SDK API outage on 28 October marked critical, posted at 21:56 UTC and resolved at 22:12 with no cause given, and a minor delay in processing flag changes on 10 September. The posted span of the outage is 16 minutes and its start isn't stated, so we read it as one serious incident under an hour (15 of 30). The Management API limit of 500 requests a minute is documented (15). No 429 handling, Retry-After or idempotency guidance was found in the docs (0). A public SLA commits to 99.95 per cent monthly uptime with service credits (10). The Management API is generally available, but the MCP docs call the server an early release, so half (5 of 10). 20+15+15+0+10+5 = 65.); Harness Feature Management & Experimentation 80 (Graded on the hosted FME Admin API with the hosted lines. Statuspage at status.harness.io with an FME component among 196 (20). In the 90 days from 8 August, two FME incidents: API write operations returned 499 errors for 30 minutes on 20 August (minor) and the FME user interface was unavailable for 15 minutes on 23 August (major, interface only; flag evaluation was unaffected per the post). No API outage of an hour or more (20 of 30). About 20 Admin API requests per 10 seconds per organisation and per IP, documented on the MCP page (15). 429 responses carry remaining and reset headers with guidance to wait for the larger reset, and the MCP server backs off and retries three times (15). No SLA was found on harness.io/pricing or the FME docs (0). FME is generally available and the MCP server is at 3.2.40 (10). 20+20+15+15+0+10 = 80.)
- Security & auth, Harness Feature Management & Experimentation +14: Flagsmith 65 (OAuth for interactive MCP clients with Flagsmith as the authorisation server, Organisation API keys in the Authorization header that act as admin or with chosen RBAC roles, and OIDC trust relationships that swap a CI token for a short-lived one. Granular key roles need Scale-Up or Enterprise, so a Free key is all-powerful (25 of 30). RBAC roles can limit a key to reads, and change requests put a flag change through approval on Scale-Up and Enterprise. There is no read-only switch on the MCP server itself (14 of 20). No prompt-injection guidance; tools return names, descriptions and trait values written by people (3 of 15). Audit logs record every admin action and stream by webhook, on Scale-Up and Enterprise (11 of 15). The docs say Flagsmith has a SOC 2 Type 2 report available on request, the terms promise a yearly third-party penetration test, and SECURITY.md routes reports to support email. No security.txt, bug bounty or public advisory process was found (12 of 20). 25+14+3+11+12 = 65.); Harness Feature Management & Experimentation 79 (Admin API keys with combinable roles that can't be widened after creation, Harness PATs and SATs for central management, and Harness Platform OAuth on the hosted MCP endpoint. Credentials travel in headers (28 of 30). HARNESS_READ_ONLY removes every write, writes go through elicitation with a risk threshold for auto-approval, and FME change requests add approval for flag changes (19 of 20). No prompt-injection guidance; the tools return flag names, descriptions and rule data written by people (3 of 15). FME admin, environment and object audit logs, plus structured MCP audit events to file, webhook or OpenTelemetry sinks (13 of 15). SOC 1 and SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, 27017 and 27018, FedRAMP 20x, a security@harness.io disclosure route with a 24-hour response, a private bug bounty on request and annual external penetration tests. No security.txt (16 of 20). 28+19+3+13+16 = 79.)