Depot vs ko

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.

ko is an open-source builder for container images of Go applications. It runs `go build` locally, so Docker does not need to be installed. The project positions it for a single Go application with few operating-system base-image dependencies, such as one without cgo or OS package requirements. Builds can target all platforms supported by the configured base image or selected platforms such as linux/amd64 and linux/arm64. For Kubernetes, `ko resolve` builds images for `ko://` references in YAML and replaces those references with image references; `ko apply` can apply the resolved configuration. ko reuses the normal Go build cache and avoids pushing image blobs already present in the remote registry. It generates and uploads SPDX-format SBOMs by default, with an option to disable this. Registry credentials can come from Docker configuration, with built-in environment credential support for Google, Amazon, Azure, and GitHub container registries. A Terraform provider supports Infrastructure-as-Code workflows. ko supports Go applications only and defaults to CGO_ENABLED=0. Windows container image support is experimental and requires a Windows base image.