KICS vs Test Kitchen
KICS
kics.ioTest Kitchen
kitchen.ciSide by side
| Figure | KICS | Test Kitchen |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Infrastructure Testing Tools | 7.9 (#12) | 8.2 (#7) |
| Installation | KICS can be run as a Docker image or built from source; its documentation also provides downloadable releases for Linux, Windows, and macOS. | Users can install the gem with gem install test-kitchen or install Cinc Workstation. |
| Purpose | KICS is an open-source static code analysis solution that finds security vulnerabilities, compliance issues, and infrastructure misconfigurations in Infrastructure as Code. | Test Kitchen is a test harness for executing infrastructure code on one or more platforms in isolation. |
| Support | The KICS core team can be contacted at [email protected], and the site points users to GitHub Discussions. | The documentation directs users to the #test-kitchen channel on Chef Community Slack for assistance from community members. |
Plans
In their own words
KICS
KICS is a free, open-source static analysis solution powered by Checkmarx. It scans Infrastructure as Code for security vulnerabilities, compliance issues, and configuration mistakes across Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS CloudFormation, Ansible, Helm, Google Deployment Manager, AWS SAM, Microsoft ARM, Azure Blueprints, OpenAPI, Pulumi, Crossplane, Knative, and Serverless Framework files. Its security queries can be edited, extended, or supplemented with new queries, using OPA Rego policy language. Documented CI and delivery integrations include GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Azure Pipelines, CircleCI, Bitbucket Pipelines, Terraform Cloud, AWS CodeBuild, pre-commit hooks, and others. A Visual Studio Code extension can scan automatically. KICS runs as a Docker image, from source, or through downloadable Linux, Windows, and macOS releases. Reports can be exported as JSON, SARIF, GitLab SAST, JUnit, HTML, PDF, CycloneDX, ASFF, or CSV. Terraform functions and environment variables are unsupported, and unofficial or custom Terraform modules are not supported.
Test Kitchen
Test Kitchen is a free test harness for running infrastructure code in isolation on one or more platforms. Its workflow uses create, converge, setup, verify, and destroy commands to provision environments and test infrastructure code. Documented drivers cover Amazon EC2, Apache CloudStack, DigitalOcean, Docker through Dokken, Google Cloud Platform, Hetzner Cloud, Vagrant, Azure, Hyper-V, OpenStack, and VMware products. Which drivers are available depends on the driver gems installed in the Ruby environment. Provisioning options include Chef Infra, Cinc Client, Habitat, PowerShell DSC, and shell scripts; listed verification integrations include Cinc Auditor, Chef InSpec, and Serverspec. Community plugins add Ansible, Puppet, and Salt provisioners. Installation is available through RubyGems, system packages, or Cinc Workstation, but Test Kitchen itself does not bundle Cinc or Chef tooling. Requirements include a 64-bit operating system and enabled CPU virtualization. The project uses Apache License 2.0 and points users to Chef Community Slack for community assistance. The documentation notes known issues and no current maintainer for kitchen-docker, recommending kitchen-dokken instead.