Depot vs Harbor

Depot provides software delivery tools spanning source control, builds, CI runners, sandboxes, caches, and registries. Its container build service is a drop-in replacement for Docker builds, with persistent caching and native x86 and Arm support. Depot CI runs existing GitHub Actions workflows as a programmable, debuggable CI service, while Depot Registry is an OCI-compliant registry for builds, pull-through caching, and other artifacts. Integrations include GitHub Actions, CircleCI, GitLab CI, Google Cloud Build, Travis CI, Bitbucket Pipelines, Buildkite, Jenkins, and AWS CodeBuild. Cache integrations cover Bazel, Go, Gradle, Maven, Pants, sccache, Nx, and Turborepo. Each build and CI run is isolated in a dedicated virtual machine. Depot says communications use TLS and storage is encrypted at rest; it also identifies SOC 2 Type 2 compliance and time-bound, permission-based debugging access. Plans start at $20 a month, billed monthly, with a 7-day trial and no free plan. Developer includes community support; Business includes Slack Connect support.

Harbor is an open-source registry for managing artifacts across cloud-native platforms such as Kubernetes and Docker. It offers a web UI and extensible API, and can be installed on Kubernetes or a system with Docker support. Security features include policies, role-based access control, vulnerability scanning, and image signing and validation. Image scanning uses Trivy when enabled during installation, and Harbor can connect to additional scanners. It replicates images and charts to or from other registries in pull or push mode; listed adapters include Docker Hub, Amazon ECR, Google Container Registry, Azure Container Registry, and GitLab Registry. Authentication options are database, LDAP/Active Directory, and OIDC, though choosing database authentication and adding local users prevents a later switch to another mode. Project storage quotas are unlimited by default but can be set globally or per project. Robot account secrets are not stored by Harbor, so they must be saved when created; robot accounts cannot log into the user interface. Harbor is a CNCF Graduated project. HTTPS is recommended for production use.