CNCF End User Survey Finds Argo CD as Majority Adopted GitOps Solution for Kubernetes

Nearly 60% of Kubernetes clusters managed by survey respondents now rely on Argo CD, with strong satisfaction fueled by 3.0 performance and security updates

SAN FRANCISCO, July 24, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- The Cloud Native Computing Foundation^® (CNCF^®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, today shared results from the 2025 Argo CD End User Survey. The CNCF graduated project is becoming a standard for production-grade Kubernetes deployments, achieving a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 79 and running in nearly 60% of Kubernetes clusters for application delivery.

The 2025 Argo CD End User Survey, conducted by CNCF and Argo maintainers, captured insights from production users, offering perspective on adoption patterns and operational usage. It highlighted Argo CD's growing maturity, with users reporting broader adoption, greater scale, and high satisfaction. The release of Argo CD 3.0 earlier this year with key improvements in performance, security, and reliability 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."

Deepening Production Use and Platform Alignment

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. This long-term use underscores the project's stability and importance in managing complex deployments.

Scalability and Efficiency at Scale

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.

User Satisfaction and Areas for Growth

Argo CD achieved an NPS of 79, with users highlighting features like AppSets, the intuitive UI, drift detection, and auto-sync. However, environment promotion remains a major challenge. 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 organizations deliver software at scale," said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF. "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.

To read the full 2025 Argo CD End User Survey results, visit:
https://blog.argoproj.io/argo-cd-2025-user-survey-results-ab045f7d5d9a

Additional Resources

• CNCF Newsletter
• CNCF Twitter
• CNCF Website
• Learn About CNCF Membership
• Learn About the CNCF End User Community

About Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Cloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private, and hybrid clouds. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CNCF brings together the industry's top developers, end users, and vendors and runs the largest open source developer conferences in the world. Supported by more than 800 members, including the world's largest cloud computing and software companies, as well as over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visit www.cncf.io.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media Contact
Kaitlin Thornhill
The Linux Foundation
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SOURCE Cloud Native Computing Foundation