Aqua Container Security vs Clair

Aqua Container Security protects container applications from build through runtime across platforms and clouds. Its image scanner checks for vulnerabilities, malware, secrets, misconfigurations, and open-source issues. Findings are prioritized using factors such as exploitability, severity, risk score, and whether workloads are running. Aqua can run images in a secure virtual sandbox to look for threats including fileless malware, supply chain attacks, and zero-day attacks. Assurance policies can prevent unapproved images from advancing to deployment, while runtime policies help prevent drift, detect attacks, and block threats in production. The product audits application security posture against NIST, PCI DSS, GDPR, and CIS Benchmarks. Listed environments include Kubernetes, OpenShift, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, VMware Tanzu, Docker, and IBM Z. Integrations include AWS Fargate, Azure Container Apps, Google Artifact Registry, Harbor, ServiceNow, and AWS Secrets Manager. Hybrid deployment, registry and CI pipeline scanning, Kubernetes admission, SBOM generation, and fix recommendations are listed. Pricing is on request; trials are 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.