Chef InSpec vs Steampipe

Chef InSpec tests and audits applications and infrastructure against a desired state described in InSpec code. Its runtime framework and rule language express compliance, security and policy requirements. Reusable profiles group controls and can include versioning, platform requirements and dependencies. Resources support testing AWS, Azure, AliCloud and GCP infrastructure, and users can create custom resources. Tests can run locally or against cloud services and infrastructure such as Linux in Docker containers. Results can be exported as JSON, HTML or plain text, or sent to Chef Automate. The kitchen-inspec verifier also runs profiles through Test Kitchen. Chef offers premium CIS- and STIG-based profiles for compliance scanning. The free tier is for non-production workloads and personal, non-commercial use; the 30-day trial is for product evaluation under non-production conditions. Commercial licensing covers production and non-production workloads, with entitlements based on purchase order. Chef InSpec 7 requires EULA acceptance, and license-key requirements depend on the distribution source. Telemetry is enabled for free and trial tiers, but not commercial users.

Steampipe provides open-source, zero-ETL tools for querying live data from APIs and services. Its CLI presents connected resources as relational tables, includes a PostgreSQL database and accepts SQL queries over dynamic information. Plugins implement the interface for each cloud service, file or other resource, so the relevant plugin is required. Steampipe can join live cloud configuration data with internal or external datasets for compliance, security, operations and cost work. Other distributions include PostgreSQL Foreign Data Wrappers, SQLite extensions that translate queries into API calls and standalone export CLIs that extract information without a database. Turbot Pipes offers hosted database instances, shared dashboards and snapshots. The plugin hub lists 157 plugins across public cloud, SaaS, security and software development categories. Installers are available for macOS, Linux and Windows, with API and self-hosted use also listed. Steampipe was founded in 2021; Turbot describes itself as founded in 2014 and bootstrapped. AWS access uses default credentials from a credential file or environment variables.