Best Infrastructure Policy as Code Tools in 2026

Fairwinds Polaris

Polaris suits Kubernetes teams seeking to validate configuration practices and address supported problems automatically.

It suits administrators setting organization-wide restrictions and project teams that need compliance guardrails.

Terraform

Terraform Community Edition is described for practitioners, while HCP Terraform’s free features are suited to small teams.

Conftest suits developers and platform teams who need to check structured configuration against policies in CI.

This tool suits platform teams that want policy checks between Terraform plan and apply in CI/CD.

Kyverno is designed for platform engineering teams using policy as code for security, compliance, automation and governance.

Open Policy Agent

OPA suits teams that want to separate policy decisions from enforcement across services, infrastructure, or delivery pipelines.

Open Policy Agent Gatekeeper

It suits Kubernetes operators who need admission controls, mutation and recurring audits in self-hosted Linux environments.

Cloud Custodian suits teams that want to express cloud security, compliance, tagging, cleanup, or cost policies in YAML.

Firefly

Firefly is aimed at enterprise cloud teams, including CIO and IT leadership, CloudOps, platform engineering, security, and governance groups.

Checkov suits developers and teams scanning infrastructure-as-code for configuration risks, credentials, or compliance checks.

KICS

KICS suits teams checking Infrastructure as Code in local environments and CI/CD pipelines.

KubeLinter suits teams that maintain Kubernetes, Helm, or Kustomize configurations and want configurable checks in local or CI workflows.

Kubewarden suits Kubernetes operators who want to manage workload policies and audit enforcement.

terraform-compliance suits developers and security teams who need readable Terraform policy checks before deployment.

Tirith suits DevSecOps engineers, infrastructure architects, cloud administrators, and others enforcing infrastructure guardrails.