Dockle vs KubeArmor

Dockle is a free, self-hosted container image linter focused on security and Docker best practices. It scans images for vulnerabilities and checks settings against CIS Docker Image Benchmarks, along with Docker- and Linux-specific issues such as empty passwords and duplicate user or group IDs. Results can be displayed or saved in JSON and SARIF formats. Users can set an exit level and ignore selected checkpoints through command options, environment variables, or a .dockleignore file. The project documents continuous-integration use and provides a GitHub Action, with examples for Travis CI, CircleCI, and GitLab CI. Dockle can access private images in Docker Hub, Amazon ECR, Google Container Registry, and self-hosted registries. It can also scan an image archive created with docker save by using the --input option. Installation routes include Homebrew, Linux distribution packages, Windows binaries, version managers, source builds, and Docker. Dockle runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows and is listed under the Apache-2.0 license.

KubeArmor is an open-source runtime security system for enforcing policies on cloud-native workloads. It uses Linux Security Modules such as AppArmor, SELinux, and BPF-LSM, with eBPF for alerts, telemetry, and container-process tracking. Policies can restrict process execution, file access, networking operations, and resource use. Container policies support Allow, Audit, and Block actions, with Block as the default; system-call monitoring is audit-only. Kubernetes policies can target pods through labels and label expressions, and rules can match paths, network protocols, capabilities, and system calls. The deployment matrix covers Kubernetes, non-Kubernetes containers, virtual machines, and bare-metal hosts. It lists Kubernetes environments including GKE, AKS, OKE, IKS, EKS, OpenShift, Rancher, and DigitalOcean Kubernetes, but support varies by operating system, architecture, and enforcement mode. Some environments are observability-only, and VMware Tanzu entries are under construction. KubeArmor is a community-governed CNCF Sandbox project. The free plan is free; installation guidance uses Helm and kubectl.