The results of the 2025 Argo CD user survey are in! We had a fantastic response, with 185 submissions, which shows the community is more engaged than ever.
This year, our goal was to capture a well-rounded view of how folks use Argo CD. We strive to stay closely connected to our users, understand where we’re excelling, and identify current pain points so we can prioritize improvements and proactively address community needs.
This year’s theme is environment promotion, as it has emerged as one of the most significant pain points currently experienced by Argo CD users.
Here’s what we learned.
TL;DR
Argo CD is growing fast and becoming a standard for deployments to production!
Compared to 2023, significantly more organizations rely on it in production. Over 60% of respondents have been actively using it in Production for more than 2 years. Patterns like ApplicationSets and self-healing have become widely adopted. Argo CD is increasingly being used at scale, with instances managing more applications, often spanning multiple clusters. We can expect scalability and performance to become the pressure points, as well as growing interest in enterprise-like capabilities from the community.
Environment promotion is where things start to get tricky. Most teams still lean on custom scripts or manual steps to get the job done. Many organizations seek solutions to improve traceability and visibility, and to standardize workflows across environments. We will likely see more maturity and new capabilities in this area.
We’re also seeing more applications under management overall, with organizations connecting more clusters to each Argo CD instance, yet still running just one to five instances. This trend points to growing pressure on instance scalability and performance.
A few more highlights from the results:
- Argo Labs projects like Argo CD Image Updater, Argo CD Operator, and Argo CD Vault Plugin are gaining traction, reflecting a push toward automation.
- Helm is by far the most popular Argo CD installation method.
- Platform engineers now make up a larger share of the community, reflecting broader organizational shifts.
What do developers really think of Argo CD?
We kicked off the survey by asking users how likely they were to recommend Argo CD to others — one of the simplest ways to get a feel for overall satisfaction.
The 2025 result? Overwhelmingly positive 🎉 Even more users this year said they’d recommend Argo CD compared to an already strong showing in 2023. That shift says a lot about how far the tool has come and the growing trust the community has in it. In fact, Argo CD achieved an impressive Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 79 — an increase of 3 points from two years ago — highlighting exceptional user satisfaction!
We were overwhelmed by the encouraging and positive comments, reflecting just how much people love the project and deeply value the vibrant Argo community. Here’s what some users had to say:
“Argo CD is incredible, I have no idea how we survived without it in the past.”
“Thanks for this great tool ❤️”
“You’re awesome!”
“Please keep going!”
“Keep up the good work! :)”
We asked which features users find most valuable. The winners?
- ApplicationSets
- Argo CD’s intuitive UI
Together, they make it much easier to manage and visualise complex deployments.
Also mentioned: auto-sync, drift detection, rollbacks, RBAC, multi-source support, and integrations.
Who’s using Argo CD these days?
The community remains consistent and is made up mostly of DevOps and platform engineers, but platform engineers have grown from 25% in 2023 to 37% in 2025. DevOps engineers declined slightly from 43% to 36%. This shift likely reflects the broader industry trend toward adopting a platform mindset, resulting in increased demand for dedicated platform engineering roles. Roles like architects and SREs remained steady.
What does adoption look like in 2025?
With the adoption being consistently high, 93% of respondents use Argo CD in production in 2023 and 97% in 2025, the implementation maturity grows significantly. In 2023, only 28% had used Argo CD in production for over 2 years. In 2025, that number jumped to 60%, and fewer than 10% were still evaluating or in early phases.
Almost 60% of respondents said that 75% or more of their production applications now run on Kubernetes.
As Kubernetes adoption deepens, Argo CD has become an essential part of the CI/CD infrastructure. As more organizations rely on Argo CD, we’ll likely see continued investment from both the community and vendors, as well as more contributors joining the project.
When it comes to Argo CD installation, Helm is by far the top choice, followed by tools like Kustomize and Terraform. Interesting to note: 19% use cluster-wide installs versus just 10% using namespace-scoped ones.
What does the Argo CD footprint look like?
The most noticeable trend is the growing number of applications. Organizations are managing bigger setups with fewer, larger instances.
In 2023, just over 15% managed more than 500 Applications; by 2025, this rose to 42%. Notably, these numbers don’t correlate with how long organizations have used Argo CD and how many applications they have.
The number of Argo CD instances is growing compared to 2023, but the increase is not as significant as the rise in the number of applications. In 2023, 77% of respondents reported having fewer than 6 instances, while this percentage fell to 64% in 2025. Nevertheless, most organizations still use only a handful of instances.
Even though the number of Argo CD instances hasn’t changed much, the number of applications certainly has! This means each instance is likely connecting to more clusters. For example, back in 2023, about 42% of instances were linked to one Kubernetes cluster. Fast forward to 2025, and that number has dropped to 25%. At the same time, the share of instances connecting to more than 20 clusters has jumped significantly, going from 5% to 25%.
In summary, organizations manage a significantly larger number of applications, with more clusters connected to a single Argo CD instance, typically keeping the number of instances between 1 and 5.
So, what does this mean for the community and the project? Well, it seems that managing lots of Argo CD instances might not be the biggest hurdle for most teams. Instead, the real pressure points are around scalability and performance as organizations push Argo CD to handle more clusters and Applications. Users are already calling out these challenges, and they’re likely to become even more important moving forward. The good news? Some of this work is already underway.
ℹ️ Interested in how to scale Argo CD? Take a look at the argocd-agent project or read an article about scaling up Argo CD.
If you want to contribute to measuring and improving Argo scalability, take a look at the Scalability special interest group (Argo SIG Scalability).
What patterns and tools are catching on?
More and more teams are following Argo CD’s recommended practices. App-of-Apps, ApplicationSets, and built-in self-healing are now widely used to manage complex GitOps setups.
We also asked about sub-projects, an area that shows the ecosystem dynamics. The most used are:
- Argo CD Image Updater
- Argo CD Operator
- Argo CD Vault Plugin
Like the patterns mentioned earlier, the popularity of these Argo Labs projects reflects growing efforts to make Argo CD implementations more structured and automation-friendly.
ℹ️ You can manage secrets with Kubernetes operators, one of the recommended ways of managing secrets on the destination cluster. This keeps Argo CD out of direct secret management, helping avoid accidental updates and reducing the risk of leaks.
Image Updater is the most adopted sub-project (used by 34% of respondents). While still under active development and intended for non-critical environments, its popularity shows just how hungry teams are for better deployment and promotion automation.
But Image Updater only solves part of the deployment automation puzzle. There’s still no go-to comprehensive solution out there. We’ll explore this further in the next section on environment promotion.
Environment promotion
Given how widely Argo CD is used in production, we wanted to explore how teams handle environment promotion. Is it a pain point for GitOps users? And how do their approaches compare to the more traditional promotion strategies used on other platforms?
First, we looked at the number of environments teams work with. Now, most respondents use 3 or fewer. Only 12% reported having more than 8.
This introduces complexity, as teams must coordinate across multiple instances. And that’s where challenges like consistent observability start to show up.
To dig deeper into this, we asked teams about their biggest pain points. What came up most?
- Traceability across environments, what version of a deployed app is running where (51%)
- Release gates (44%)
- Understanding app health and status across environments (37%)
- Keeping pipeline definitions consistent (36%)
- Troubleshooting failed promotions (29%)
Most teams reported multiple challenges, with traceability and release gates often mentioned together.
To understand what drives these challenges, we asked how teams promote applications across environments.
The most common setup is DIY. Around 67% use scripts, in-house tools, or both.
Nearly a quarter of teams handle promotions solely through manual manifest updates, and almost half use some form of manual step, often paired with scripts.
So, how can we make sense of this combination? One possibility is that teams are using Argo CD Image Updater, currently the most popular sub-project, for simple, image-only updates. For more complex tasks, like updating configuration files, many might rely on manual steps. In other words, automation helps with the easy stuff, but more involved changes still need hands-on work.
ℹ️ Manual manifest updates are often where teams start with Argo CD. They can work well for small setups, like a few static infrastructure manifests.
But as you scale, they tend to fall short. It’s easy to run into slower deployments, more manual overhead, and challenges around security and compliance. If you’re growing with Argo CD, it’s worth moving toward full CI/CD automation to keep things on track.
A few out-of-the-box solutions for automated environment promotion are starting to show up in the survey. The most mentioned, though still only used by 4% of respondents, is GitOps Promoter. It’s part of the Argo CD ecosystem and works alongside Hydrator to handle promotions via pull requests. Others mentioned Codefresh GitOps and Kargo.
Here’s how one person summed it up:
“Some sort of environment promotion. Lots of players in the game now and it’s hard to settle on one. Lots of manual reviews required for manifest changes that can be tiresome to compare against other environments. Some sort of environment comparison tool would be good.”
That quote really captures where things stand. Plenty is happening in this space, but no clear winner or standard approach just yet. As more teams adopt Argo CD and take on more advanced deployment setups, tackling challenges like traceability, testing, and consistent configuration will only become more important.
This is definitely a space to watch. Expect more tooling, more investment, and, hopefully, comprehensive user-friendly solutions soon.
What challenges are teams facing?
After digging into environment promotion, we zoomed out and asked about broader challenges, too.
Nearly 30% of respondents said they had no major challenges with Argo CD, which is a great sign.
The most common challenge, flagged by 37%, was environment modeling and promotion workflows (covered earlier).
Other pain points included:
- Troubleshooting deployments and app issues (25%)
- Too much manual work or not enough automation (23%)
- Limited visibility into deployment status (16%)
What features are missing?
To wrap up, we asked what users think is missing from Argo CD. Many of the responses built on earlier themes.
Some areas users want to see improved:
- Support for promoting apps through stages and managing service dependencies.
- Better templating in ApplicationSets, progressive syncs, and built-in promotion workflows.
- Multi-cluster visibility and faster UI performance.
- Enterprise-grade features like fine-grained RBAC, audit trails, Vault and Prometheus integrations, and better error messages.
As teams scale up, these requests point toward a natural next step: evolving Argo CD into a full-featured, enterprise-ready platform.
Final words
The 2025 survey gave us a ton to think about. We saw just how far Argo CD has come, what’s working well, and what needs more attention. All these insights are gold for the project’s future evolution.
Huge thanks to everyone who took the time to share feedback!
Special shoutout to those who offered to help with case studies, blog posts, talks, or quotes. It really helps grow the community!
And thanks to Katie Lamkin-Fulsher, Dan Garfield, Henrik Blixt, Michael Crenshaw, Christian Hernandez, Regina Voloshin, Kostis Kapelonis, Jenny Blekh and Tegan Ali, who made this survey possible.
<hr /><p>Argo CD 2025 User Survey Results was originally published in Argo Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.</p>