Anchore Enterprise vs Harbor

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.

Harbor is an open-source registry for managing artifacts across cloud-native platforms such as Kubernetes and Docker. It offers a web UI and extensible API, and can be installed on Kubernetes or a system with Docker support. Security features include policies, role-based access control, vulnerability scanning, and image signing and validation. Image scanning uses Trivy when enabled during installation, and Harbor can connect to additional scanners. It replicates images and charts to or from other registries in pull or push mode; listed adapters include Docker Hub, Amazon ECR, Google Container Registry, Azure Container Registry, and GitLab Registry. Authentication options are database, LDAP/Active Directory, and OIDC, though choosing database authentication and adding local users prevents a later switch to another mode. Project storage quotas are unlimited by default but can be set globally or per project. Robot account secrets are not stored by Harbor, so they must be saved when created; robot accounts cannot log into the user interface. Harbor is a CNCF Graduated project. HTTPS is recommended for production use.