Cinc Auditor vs Sonobuoy

Cinc Auditor is a free distribution of Chef InSpec for compliance and audit workflows on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Its profiles are fully compatible with upstream counterparts, and its tools work with InSpec; an InSpec wrapper redirects to Cinc Auditor so existing automation can keep working. Installation options include scripts, Bundler, RubyGems, and plain packages. Cinc also publishes a Docker Hub image as a drop-in replacement for chef/inspec. It can run InSpec-compatible profiles in CI or against containers, with GitLab CI and GitHub Actions named as examples. Auditor is included in Cinc Workstation. Cinc says its binaries use the Apache 2.0 license without additional EULAs or licensing. The project does not provide formal warranties or support, and it does not currently offer repositories for standard package managers such as yum or apt. The free plan costs nothing. Cinc recommends contacting Progress for warranty or support needs.

Sonobuoy is a free, open-source diagnostic tool for examining Kubernetes cluster state with non-destructive configuration tests. It can check a cluster against official Kubernetes specifications and produce diagnostics for troublesome workloads. Teams can build plugins for additional tests and data collection. Its default plugins run Kubernetes end-to-end tests and gather systemd logs; community options include CIS Benchmarks, Kube-hunter, Who-can, Cluster-Inventory, and Reliability Scanner. It is cluster agnostic and officially supports the latest three minor Kubernetes versions. Beginning with version 0.20, it supports Kubernetes 1.17 or later. Sonobuoy can run end-to-end tests with custom registries in air-gapped deployments. It requires an active Kubernetes cluster and an admin kubeconfig, and can be installed from binary releases or through Homebrew on macOS. The project provides community support through GitHub. Its documentation warns that default settings need explicit hardening, and notes that some logging and retrieval commands can fail on Docker Desktop Kubernetes.