Anchore Secure vs Sealed Secrets: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
Anchore Secure is a commercial container security tool by Anchore. Sealed Secrets 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.
Teams running Kubernetes who need to stop storing plaintext secrets in Git will find Sealed Secrets invaluable because it encrypts secrets at rest using asymmetric cryptography tied to each cluster, making accidental commits harmless. With 8,956 GitHub stars and adoption across thousands of clusters, the tooling is battle-tested and the encryption implementation is auditable. Skip this if you need secrets management across multiple clusters or cloud providers; Sealed Secrets' per-cluster key design forces operational overhead that centralized vaults like Vault or native cloud secret managers handle more elegantly.
