Determinate Systems vs GUAC

Determinate Systems provides an end-to-end Nix toolchain for installation, collaboration, and deployment across developer laptops, CI, cloud, and edge devices. The platform combines Determinate Nix, FlakeHub, and Determinate Secure Packages. Determinate Nix adds lazy trees, parallel evaluation, stable flakes by default, and a native Linux builder for macOS. FlakeHub offers binary caching, private flakes, organization controls, semantic versioning, and deployment of NixOS, Home Manager, and nix-darwin configurations without local evaluation. Secure Packages is a supported Nixpkgs replacement with curated packages and cryptographic signing. It includes CycloneDX 1.5 SBOM generation, policy checks, and vulnerability scanning; critical vulnerabilities are said to be patched within seven days. Distributions receive at least 12 months of support, with one in four receiving 60 months. Platforms listed are Linux, macOS, Windows, and web. A free plan is available.

GUAC ingests software metadata, including software bills of materials, and connects it into a queryable view of supply-chain relationships. That portfolio-level view lets developers, operations and security practitioners, and Open Source Program Offices examine dependencies across software rather than one SBOM at a time. Teams can look for vulnerable, deprecated, unsupported, or duplicated dependencies and identify risky upstreams using OpenSSF Scorecard. APIs and a visualization tool support queries and exploration. GUAC documents SPDX and CycloneDX SBOM formats, with graph enrichment from OSV for vulnerability data, ClearlyDefined for license information, and Deps.dev for dependency information. Its GraphQL server can use in-memory storage or PostgreSQL for persistence. Collectors can read or watch files, storage buckets, and Git repositories; the filesystem collector is stable, while other collectors are experimental. Setup uses Docker Compose and requires Docker, Docker Compose, and jq. The project is an OpenSSF Incubating Project. GUAC is free and open source: its code is under the MIT license, and documentation content is under CC BY 4.0.