Fairwinds Polaris vs KubeArmor

Fairwinds Polaris is an open source policy engine for validating and remediating Kubernetes resource configuration. It includes more than 30 built-in policies, and teams can add their own using JSON Schema. Checks cover security practices such as least privilege, privilege escalation, root execution, and host IPC or PID settings, along with resource requests and limits, readiness and liveness probes, and image tags. Polaris can run as a dashboard, an admission controller, or a command-line tool for checking local YAML files in CI/CD. Its validating webhook rejects workloads that trigger danger-level checks; warning-level findings pass and appear in the dashboard or webhook logs. A mutating webhook or command-line run can automatically remediate supported issues, including missing limits and probes and some unsafe security settings. The dashboard can audit local files or connect to a live cluster, and can be installed with kubectl or Helm. The validating webhook requires a valid TLS certificate. Polaris is free and runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, web, and self-hosted environments.

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.