Anchore Secure vs Clair: 2026 Comparison
Anchore Secure is a commercial container security tool by Anchore. Clair is a free container security tool. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best container security fit for your security stack.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of NIST CSF 2.0 coverage, core features, integrations, company size fit, here is our conclusion:
Mid-market and enterprise teams with strict vulnerability governance will get the most from Anchore Secure, specifically its ability to track historical vulnerability exposure without forcing rescans of every image each time a new CVE drops. The SBOM generation through Syft and policy-based compliance checks directly address NIST ID.RA risk assessment requirements. Skip this if your team needs runtime threat detection; Anchore is a scanning and inventory tool, not a behavioral enforcement platform.
Development teams shipping containers through CI/CD pipelines should start with Clair because it catches known vulnerabilities at build time before they reach production, and the free, open source model means zero licensing friction for catching this at scale. With 10,942 GitHub stars and deep integration into container registries via API indexing, Clair is battle-tested in high-volume scanning workflows. Skip it if you need runtime threat detection or vulnerability prioritization based on exploitability; Clair is static analysis only, which means it flags everything in the database regardless of whether the vulnerability actually matters for your application.
