CNCF: Argo CD is top of the GitOps pops for Kubernetes
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has shared results from the 2025 Argo CD End User Survey.
Argo is an enterprise software suite of open source tools designed to underpin and enable cloud-native software delivery within Kubernetes delpoyments; it is distinguished by its Kubernetes-native approach in respect of its ability to manage workflows, handle continuous delivery and steer event-driven automation.
Argo Workflows is an open source container-native workflow engine for orchestrating parallel jobs on Kubernetes. Argo Workflows is implemented as a Kubernetes Custom Resource Definition (CRD).
As a CNCF graduated project, Argo is becoming a standard for production-grade Kubernetes deployments and this study conducted by CNCF and Argo maintainers, captured insights from production users, offering perspective on adoption patterns and operational usage.
It highlighted Argo CD‘s maturity, with users reporting broader adoption and greater scale.
The release of Argo CD 3.0 earlier this year with key improvements in performance, security and reliability may have helped drive this progress and deepen user trust.
“The 2025 survey reinforces what we’ve seen in the community: Argo CD is trusted, stable, and delivering real operational gains at scale,” said Dan Garfield, Argo maintainer and VP of open source at Octopus Deploy. “We’re seeing sustained production use, increasing pressure on scalability, and wider adoption across platform teams. These trends reflect how central Argo CD has become to running reliable, efficient cloud native infrastructure.”
Argo CD continues to gain traction in real-world environments, with 97% of survey respondents using it in production, up from 93% in 2023, and 60% relying on it for more than two years. Platform engineers now represent 37% of users, reflecting Argo CD’s rising role in internal developer platforms where consistency and automation are critical.
The CNCF says this long-term use underscores the project’s stability and importance in managing complex deployments.
Scalability & efficiency
Teams are managing more applications with fewer resources, as 42% now oversee over 500 applications per Argo CD instance, an increase from just 15% in 2023, and 25% connect those instances to more than 20 clusters. This signals growing confidence in Argo CD’s ability to scale and operate efficiently across large, distributed environments.
Most teams still rely on manual processes or custom scripts to move applications between environments.
Emerging tools like GitOps Promoter, Kargo and Codefresh GitOps are gaining attention, but a standard solution has yet to emerge.
“As cloud native adoption matures, it’s clear that GitOps and projects like Argo are central to how organisations deliver software at scale,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, cloud & infrastructure, The Linux Foundation. “These survey results reflect both the project’s strong momentum and the trust end users place in the CNCF ecosystem.”
Argo CD is a declarative, GitOps-based continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes. It runs as a Kubernetes controller that continuously monitors Git repositories and ensures the declared application state is deployed across clusters. This enables consistent, automated, and self-healing delivery processes. With support for multi-cluster, multi-application environments and tight Git integration, Argo CD helps teams standardize deployments, improve visibility, and scale operations reliably in cloud native environments.
The full 2025 Argo CD end user survey results are here.
