Chainloop vs Sigstore

Chainloop centralizes software delivery artifacts and evidence to support security, compliance and visibility across the delivery process. Its evidence store can hold metadata for SBOMs, QA reports, vulnerability scans and legal reviews. It connects metadata and artifacts in a graph, providing provenance and context for control gates, quality checks and compliance dashboards. The CLI and integrations capture evidence from CI/CD pipelines, including Git commit details and pipeline configuration. Documentation describes signing metadata with SLSA, in-toto, Sigstore or customer PKI such as AWS KMS or Keyfactor. Deployment options include cloud and self-managed setups, including on-premises and airgapped environments. The paid platform adds curated policies and frameworks such as SLSA, SSDF, CRA, DORA and NIS2. Community Edition costs nothing, is free and open source, and is self-hosted with community support; it has no UI or curated policy library. The enterprise Chainloop Platform has pricing available by contacting the maker and lists dedicated support.

Sigstore is a free, open source project for signing and verifying software artifacts to improve supply chain security. It supports release files, container images, binaries, software bills of materials, and more. Signatures use temporary keys, so developers do not have to manage signing keys; events are recorded in a tamper-resistant public log for audit. Its components include Cosign, Fulcio, Rekor, OpenID Connect, and Policy Controller. Cosign signs and verifies artifacts and stores signatures in an OCI registry. Fulcio issues temporary certificates to authorized identities, while Rekor keeps signed metadata in a searchable ledger. OpenID Connect authenticates users through providers such as GitHub and Google. The trust root uses The Update Framework and is maintained by five keyholders from different companies and academic institutions. Sigstore provides GitHub Actions, documents GitLab CI installation, and offers official clients for Go, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, and Rust. It supports API, Linux, macOS, Windows, and self-hosted environments. One integration caveat is that Cosign has no API stability guarantees, does not follow semantic versioning, and is not recommended for application integration because of its dependencies.