Litmus
Litmus (LitmusChaos) is a CNCF-incubating open-source Chaos Engineering platform for Kubernetes, enabling SREs and platform engineers to inject controlled failures and validate cloud-native resilience. Founded in 2017 and commercially backed by Harness Inc. via its enterprise HCE product.
- Company typePrivate
- Founded2017
- HeadquartersSan Francisco, United States
- Headcount11–50
- GTM typeB2B
- OfferingSoftware
What Litmus does
Litmus (also known as LitmusChaos) is a CNCF-hosted, open-source Chaos Engineering platform founded in 2017 by ChaosNative and headquartered in San Francisco. The platform enables Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), Platform Engineers, and Kubernetes developers to proactively identify infrastructure weaknesses in cloud-native systems by orchestrating controlled chaos experiments across pods, nodes, networks, applications, and cloud services. Built on Kubernetes Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) — ChaosEngine, ChaosExperiment, and ChaosResult — LitmusChaos is written in Go and distributed via Helm charts on GitHub under Apache License 2.0, supported by a community of 250+ contributors, 2.5K+ Slack members, and 5.5K+ GitHub stars.
The core technology stack includes the ChaosCenter web UI for experiment orchestration, ChaosHub as a centralized catalog of pre-built experiments, Litmus Probes for steady-state hypothesis validation (HTTP, CMD, K8s, Prometheus), GitOps and CI/CD pipeline integration, Prometheus metrics export, and a LitmusChaos MCP Server launched in October 2025 enabling natural-language, AI-driven chaos operations via the Model Context Protocol. Notable integrations span Dynatrace, Grafana, Argo Workflows, OpenTelemetry, and k6 load testing. Adopter logos include Intuit, Red Hat, Orange, Lenskart, Halodoc, Kitopi, Flipkart, Delivery Hero, Talend, iFood, NetApp, VMware, and Wipro, spanning financial services, telecom, e-commerce, healthcare, food delivery, and SaaS.
The business model is dual: the open-source LitmusChaos project generates no direct revenue and serves as a top-of-funnel developer acquisition channel, while commercial revenue flows through Harness Chaos Engineering (HCE), the enterprise SaaS offering built and sold by Harness Inc., which acquired ChaosNative in 2022. HCE is sold via direct enterprise field sales and includes advanced features such as GameDay experiences, CI/CD pipeline integration, the largest chaos experiment library, expert support, and training certifications delivered through Harness University and Udemy. Pricing for the commercial product is not publicly disclosed.
Litmus firmographics
Firmographics- Name
- Litmus
- Legal name
- LitmusChaos (Cloud Native Computing Foundation project)
- Website
- https://litmuschaos.io
- Company type
- Private
- Founded year
- 2017
- Operating status
- Operating
- Headcount range
- 11–50 employees
- Short description
- Litmus (LitmusChaos) is a CNCF-incubating open-source Chaos Engineering platform for Kubernetes, enabling SREs and platform engineers to inject controlled failures and validate cloud-native resilience. Founded in 2017 and commercially backed by Harness Inc. via its enterprise HCE product.
- Ownership category
- akta.pro rank
Litmus industry classification
Industry- Product category
- Cloud-Native Chaos Engineering Software
- NAICS
- Computer Systems Design and Related Services (5415), Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services (518)
- SIC
- Services-Prepackaged Software (7372), Services-Computer Integrated Systems Design (7373)
- akta.pro primary industry
- Multi-Region / Multi-Cloud Resilience Orchestration (HDABAIAF)
- akta.pro secondary industries
- Hybrid & Multi-Cloud Orchestration (Private-Cloud-Centric) (HDABABAE), Disaster Recovery Orchestration & Automation (Runbooks) (HDABAIAH)
Keywords
Where Litmus is headquartered
LocationHeadquarters
- HQ city
- San Francisco
- HQ country
- United States
- HQ region
- North America
Markets served
Litmus business model
Business model- GTM type
- B2B
- Offering type
- Software
- Cost components
- Personnel, Technology or R&D, Marketing or Sales, Operations
Revenue model
- Open Source (Free Community Edition): LitmusChaos core is a fully open-source project under Apache License 2.0, freely downloadable and deployable on any Kubernetes cluster. No revenue is generated from the open-source product itself; its purpose is community growth and developer adoption.
- Harness Chaos Engineering (Commercial Enterprise Platform): Harness (which acquired the original LitmusChaos creator ChaosNative) offers a commercial enterprise version of chaos engineering. This is a subscription-based SaaS or self-hosted offering providing enterprise-grade features (largest experiment library, GameDay, CI/CD integration, expert support, training certifications) beyond the open-source version. Revenue is generated through enterprise subscription contracts.
Pricing tiers
| Model | Billing | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Freemium | Others | Open Source (Free) |
Go-to-market motion2 records
Distribution channels4 records
Marketing channels8 records
Litmus product offering
Product offeringCore offering
Litmus (LitmusChaos) is a CNCF-hosted, open-source chaos engineering platform for cloud-native infrastructure and Kubernetes workloads. It enables developers and SREs to inject controlled failures, validate application health through probes, and identify infrastructure weaknesses before they cause production outages. The commercial enterprise edition, Harness Chaos Engineering, extends the open-source platform with expert support, CI/CD integration, the largest experiment library, and GameDay experiences.
Product overview
Litmus is a CNCF-hosted, open-source Chaos Engineering platform consisting of multiple integrated components. The core product is LitmusChaos (open source), which provides an end-to-end platform for cloud native chaos engineering with features including ChaosCenter (web UI), ChaosHub (experiment library), Litmus Probes (validation), and the Litmus MCP Server (AI integration). The commercial enterprise offering is Harness Chaos Engineering, which provides enterprise-grade capabilities including CI/CD pipeline integration, observability integrations (Dynatrace, Prometheus), GameDay experiences, and the largest chaos experiment library. LitmusChaos was originally created by ChaosNative (acquired by Harness) and became a CNCF incubating project in January 2022. Training is available through Harness University and Udemy.
Differentiator
Problem solved
Functional benefit
Brands
- ChaosHub: A centralized hub hosting pre-built, tested, and tunable chaos experiments for quick start in chaos engineering.
- ChaosCenter
- Litmus MCP Server
Products and services
- LitmusChaos (Open Source) End-to-end open-source chaos engineering platform for cloud-native infrastructure and Kubernetes applications. Helps SREs and platform engineers identify infrastructure weaknesses through safe, controlled chaos experiments, deployed via Helm charts on Kubernetes clusters. Apache License 2.0.
- Harness Chaos Engineering (HCE) Enterprise-grade commercial chaos engineering platform offered by Harness. Provides advanced features including the largest chaos experiment library, CI/CD pipeline integration with Harness CD/CV, observability integrations (Dynatrace, Prometheus), GameDay experiences, and expert support. Sold via enterprise subscription contracts.
- LitmusChaos MCP Server A Go-based Model Context Protocol server that exposes LitmusChaos capabilities to AI assistants, enabling natural-language-driven chaos engineering operations including experiment management, infrastructure control, environment organization, and resilience probe validation.
- LitmusChaos Training & Certification Hands-on chaos engineering training and certifications delivered via Harness University (instructor-led) and Udemy (self-paced courses), teaching Kubernetes-native resilient microservices and reliability pipelines using LitmusChaos.
- ChaosHub Centralized public catalog hosting the largest collection of pre-built, community-contributed, declarative chaos experiments that users can browse, deploy, and contribute back to. Supports experiment chaining in sequence or parallel to build complex chaos scenarios.
Quantifiable outcome
- 2M+ chaos experiments run across 140+ organisations in 50+ countries
- +3 more outcomes
Companies that use Litmus
Customer profileNamed customers12 records
Segments4 records
Ideal customer profiles3 records
Litmus technology and API
TechnologyTechnology focussed Yes
API detail
- Has API
- Yes
- API docs
- API detail
Core technology
AI maturity
App detail
Integration11 records
AI capability3 records
Feature10 records
Litmus partnerships and signals
Strategic signalPartnerships
Five partnerships are on record, tiered core, flagship and minor.
- Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)coreLitmusChaos became a CNCF incubating project in January 2022, donated by ChaosNative (later acquired by Harness). CNCF provides governance, marketing support, ecosystem integration, and event visibility. The project aims for CNCF Graduation.
- Harness (ChaosNative acquisition)flagshipChaosNative, the company founded by the creators of LitmusChaos, was acquired by Harness. Harness now builds Harness Chaos Engineering as the commercial enterprise edition, while LitmusChaos remains open source under CNCF governance. The acquisition enables a land-and-expand GTM: open-source users demonstrate value before converting to Harness subscriptions.
- Harness Chaos Engineering (HCE)flagshipHarness Chaos Engineering is the commercial product built by Harness using expertise from LitmusChaos creators. It integrates with Harness CD and CV pipelines, Dynatrace, Prometheus, and offers the largest chaos experiment library. Partners listed on litmuschaos.io/enterprise offer enterprise distributions, training, and commercial support.
- Harness UniversitycoreHarness University offers hands-on, instructor-led Chaos Engineering training with LitmusChaos as the training platform. Acts as a training partner distributing LitmusChaos knowledge and certifications to enterprise learners.
- UdemyminorUdemy hosts a self-paced course 'Build Kubernetes-native Resilient Microservices and Reliability Pipelines with LitmusChaos' for individual developers and teams wanting to learn chaos engineering using LitmusChaos.
Scale indicators9 records
Recent moves7 records
Expansion highlights5 records
Litmus competitors and assessment
Company assessmentDirect peers
- Gremlin: Gremlin is the most well-known commercial SaaS chaos engineering platform, offering failure injection and resilience testing directly comparable to LitmusChaos/Harness Chaos Engineering across Kubernetes and broader infrastructure. It is the primary direct competitor for enterprise chaos engineering spend.
- ChaosBlade: ChaosBlade is an open-source chaos engineering toolkit from Alibaba covering multiple languages and infrastructure layers. It overlaps with LitmusChaos on the open-source chaos engineering category and competes for community contributors and adopters in cloud-native environments.
- Steadybit: Steadybit is a commercial chaos engineering platform focused on Kubernetes and cloud platforms, offering reliability testing with strong enterprise SaaS delivery. It competes head-to-head with Harness Chaos Engineering in the same buyer accounts as Litmus's commercial pathway.
- Chaos Mesh: Chaos Mesh is a CNCF-hosted open-source chaos engineering platform for Kubernetes, directly comparable to LitmusChaos in technology (Kubernetes-native CRDs), open-source distribution model, and target SRE persona. It is the closest open-source competitor for community mindshare.
Broad incumbents
- Azure Chaos Studio: Azure Chaos Studio is Microsoft's managed chaos engineering service for Azure-hosted workloads, providing a direct enterprise alternative to LitmusChaos for Azure-native customers and competing on procurement convenience within the Microsoft ecosystem.
- AWS Fault Injection Service: AWS Fault Injection Service is a managed chaos engineering offering tightly integrated with the AWS ecosystem, comparable to LitmusChaos's cloud-service-level fault injection but bundled into the AWS platform. It competes for the same reliability-testing budget within AWS-centric enterprises.
- Google Cloud Fault Injection Testing: Google Cloud's Fault Injection Testing capability is part of the broader Google Cloud reliability suite, comparable to LitmusChaos's chaos experimentation capabilities and bundled into GCP for cloud-native resilience testing.
Others
- Datadog: Datadog is a broad observability and monitoring platform that integrates with chaos engineering workflows and serves the same SRE/Platform Engineering buyer as LitmusChaos. While not a direct chaos competitor, it is a complementary/adjacent player in the cloud reliability stack.
- Harness: Harness is the parent company of the entity that built LitmusChaos (via the ChaosNative acquisition) and is the exclusive commercial sponsor of the platform. It is relevant as the strategic partner that monetises Litmus's open-source adoption through Harness Chaos Engineering and broader DevOps platform.
- PagerDuty: PagerDuty is a leading incident response and reliability platform for SREs, adjacent to LitmusChaos's chaos engineering focus. The two are complementary in SRE toolchains, with LitmusChaos proactively identifying weaknesses before PagerDuty responds to resulting incidents.
Market position
Strengths5 records
Weaknesses5 records
Competitive moat5 records
Key risks5 records
Key highlights7 records
Customer concentration
Litmus social profiles
Digital presenceLitmus compliance and trust
Trust signalCompliance1 record
Litmus financial estimates
Financial estimateRevenue estimate
Valuation estimate
Litmus leadership team
Management profileNumber of profiles
Litmus funding detail
Funding detailFunding overview
Funding rounds
Investors
Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Litmus M&A and investment
M&A and investmentM&A
Investments
M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Frequently asked questions about Litmus
What does Litmus do?
Litmus (LitmusChaos) is a CNCF-hosted, open-source chaos engineering platform for cloud-native infrastructure and Kubernetes workloads. It enables developers and SREs to inject controlled failures, validate application health through probes, and identify infrastructure weaknesses before they cause production outages. The commercial enterprise edition, Harness Chaos Engineering, extends the open-source platform with expert support, CI/CD integration, the largest experiment library, and GameDay experiences.
Is Litmus a public or private company?
Litmus is a private company. It is classified as corporate owned and is currently operating.
When was Litmus founded?
Litmus was founded in 2017. It employs 11 to 50 people.
Where is Litmus based?
Litmus is headquartered in San Francisco, United States, in the North America region.
How does Litmus make money?
Two revenue lines are on record. Open Source (Free Community Edition) is the primary driver. The others are harness Chaos Engineering (Commercial Enterprise Platform).
Who are Litmus's main competitors?
Direct peers on record are Gremlin, ChaosBlade, Steadybit and Chaos Mesh. Broad incumbents are Azure Chaos Studio, AWS Fault Injection Service and Google Cloud Fault Injection Testing. Others are Datadog, Harness and PagerDuty.
Does Litmus have an API?
Yes. Litmus provides a GraphQL API for chaos engineering operations. The API is documented at https://litmuschaos.github.io/litmus/graphql/v2.0.0/api.html. A Go SDK is also available at https://github.com/litmuschaos/litmus-go. Additionally, a Litmus MCP Server is available that exposes LitmusChaos capabilities via the Model Context Protocol, allowing MCP-compatible AI clients (e.g., Claude Desktop) to discover, run, and monitor chaos experiments using natural language. Developer documentation is at litmuschaos.github.io/litmus/graphql/v2.0.0/api.html.
What industry is Litmus in?
Litmus's product category is Cloud-Native Chaos Engineering Software. Its primary akta.pro industry code is HDABAIAF, Multi-Region / Multi-Cloud Resilience Orchestration, with a secondary code of HDABABAE, Hybrid & Multi-Cloud Orchestration (Private-Cloud-Centric). Its NAICS code is 5415 and its SIC code is 7372.