Anchore Enterprise vs Clair

Anchore Enterprise is an SBOM-powered platform for continuous software supply-chain security and compliance. It generates software bills of materials for containers, source code, and filesystems in Syft, CycloneDX, and SPDX formats, then continuously scans those SBOMs for vulnerabilities, secrets, and malware. Policy packs cover NIST, FedRAMP, and DISA, while policy-as-code rules use JSON instructions that can be version controlled in Git. Runtime inventory can cover images running across EKS, ECS, AKE, GKE, and OpenShift clusters. Deployment options include an AWS machine image or container images installed with Helm on Kubernetes-compatible platforms, including air-gapped environments. Every feature and operation can be instrumented through an API. Integrations include major CI, registry, and cloud services such as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Amazon ECR, Azure DevOps, Docker Hub, and Harbor. It supports API, Linux, self-hosted, and web environments. Pricing is on request; there is no free plan, but a free trial is available.

Clair is a free, Apache 2.0-licensed open-source service for static vulnerability analysis of OCI and Docker container images. It runs self-hosted on Linux and exposes an API: clients submit image manifests, Clair indexes their layers, scans image contents, and returns a persisted IndexReport. Analysis examines image contents rather than runtime behavior. Content-addressed OCI manifests and layers help avoid duplicate indexing. Clair continually ingests security data, while matcher requests provide current vulnerability analysis for an IndexReport; its notifier checks indexed manifests when new vulnerabilities appear and follows configured actions. The documented support matrix includes Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, SUSE, Oracle, Alpine, AWS Linux, VMware Photon, and Python base containers. Clair v4 uses ClairCore as its analysis engine. Release 4.9.0 notes NVD 2.0 JSON feeds for CVSS enrichment and SPDX 2.3 encoding for index reports. The README lists a mailing list, IRC channel, and GitHub issues for community contact, and directs users to releases because the main branch may be unstable or broken. The listed plan is free.