Cloud Native Buildpacks Pack vs Earthly

Cloud Native Buildpacks Pack is a free command-line tool for building applications with buildpacks and rebasing the resulting application images. It is maintained by the Cloud Native Buildpacks project and is also available as a Go library. Buildpacks turn application source code into container images that can run on any cloud. Listed capabilities include caching, automatic source detection, modular buildpacks, support for multiple languages and processes, minimal images, reproducible builds and reuse of community buildpacks. Pack supports multi-architecture builds and multiple build-cache backends, and the project lists build-time software bills of materials in CycloneDX, SPDX and Syft JSON formats. The CLI runs on Linux, macOS and Windows; installation options include package managers, container images, scripts and manual installation. Builds need a containerized environment and a daemon such as Docker or Podman, and some setups may need the local Docker socket mounted. The project documents CircleCI, GitLab Auto DevOps and Tekton integrations, as well as kpack for Kubernetes-native builds and image updates. Pack is Apache-2.0 licensed.

Earthly Lunar monitors software development activity and applies engineering policies across developer and AI workflows. It collects structured metadata from source repositories and CI/CD pipelines, then evaluates it against policies an organization defines. Lunar can be added to existing CI/CD pipelines without YAML changes or wholesale pipeline rewrites. Its guardrails can run while code is authored, on pull requests, and at deployment gates; enforcement can progress from draft and scoring to comments or blocking pull requests and deployments. Earthly lists more than 200 prebuilt guardrails for testing, security, compliance, and operational readiness. The integrations page lists 66 integrations, with Bash-script options for custom collectors and catalogers. Documentation includes a SQL API for engineering data and a CI agent that can run on self-hosted runners and is compatible with major CI vendors. Earthly says its services and databases are hosted on AWS in the United States, data is encrypted at rest and in transit, and it has SOC 2 Type II compliance. Earthfiles, an open-source portable build syntax, remains available. Earthly says the company was founded in 2020 and Lunar launched in 2026.