Anchore Enterprise vs GUAC

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.

GUAC ingests software metadata, including software bills of materials, and connects it into a queryable view of supply-chain relationships. That portfolio-level view lets developers, operations and security practitioners, and Open Source Program Offices examine dependencies across software rather than one SBOM at a time. Teams can look for vulnerable, deprecated, unsupported, or duplicated dependencies and identify risky upstreams using OpenSSF Scorecard. APIs and a visualization tool support queries and exploration. GUAC documents SPDX and CycloneDX SBOM formats, with graph enrichment from OSV for vulnerability data, ClearlyDefined for license information, and Deps.dev for dependency information. Its GraphQL server can use in-memory storage or PostgreSQL for persistence. Collectors can read or watch files, storage buckets, and Git repositories; the filesystem collector is stable, while other collectors are experimental. Setup uses Docker Compose and requires Docker, Docker Compose, and jq. The project is an OpenSSF Incubating Project. GUAC is free and open source: its code is under the MIT license, and documentation content is under CC BY 4.0.