Fairwinds Polaris vs Sysdig Secure

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.

Sysdig Secure is a cloud-native application protection platform for cloud environments, containers, Kubernetes, hosts, and serverless workloads. It uses runtime insights to prioritize risks that are exploitable in a customer’s environment. Threat detection runs in real time using Falco rules, machine learning, and drift control; vulnerability scanning is available with agent-based or agentless approaches and prioritizes vulnerabilities in use. Cloud Attack Graph connects vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and excessive permissions to map potential attack paths. Sysdig Sage is an AI assistant for security search, vulnerability management, threat investigation, and response. The platform connects to AWS, GCP, and Azure, and documents integrations including Git, Jira, Snyk, Docker Scout, Splunk, Elasticsearch, and Syslog. Sysdig describes support for on-premises, air-gapped, and private cloud environments. Deployment is hybrid, with licensing based on hosts or compute instances for CSPM. The documented agent supports Linux distributions and Windows Server 2019 and later; the vulnerability CLI scanner is available for Linux and macOS. Pricing is by quote rather than displayed.