head to head · open source
kyverno vs tfsec
kyverno has 8,316 GitHub stars, 1,696 forks, 703 open issues and last shipped yesterday. tfsec has 7,061 stars, 560 forks, 18 open issues and last shipped 8 months ago. kyverno leads on adoption by 18% (8,316 vs 7,061 stars). kyverno is written in Go under Apache-2.0; tfsec is written in Go under MIT. kyverno has attracted 20% as many forks as stars, tfsec 8%. kyverno was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (compliance), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| kyverno | tfsec | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 8.3K | ★ 7.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-03-25 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 560 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick kyverno if
- You weight community size — 8.3K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick tfsec if
- You want the tfsec feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and tfsec fits your workflow better
About kyverno
Kyverno Cloud Native Policy Management 🎉 📑 Table of Contents About Kyverno Non Goals Documentation Demos & Tutorials Popular Use Cases Explore the Policy Library Getting Help Contributing Software Bill of Materials Contributors License About Kyverno Kyverno is a Kubernetes native policy engine designed for platform engineering teams. It enables security, compliance, automation, and governance through policy as code. Kyverno can: Validate, mutate, generate, and clean up resources using Kubernetes admission controls and background scans. Verify container image signatures for supply chain security. Operate with…
read the full kyverno overview →
About tfsec
📣 tfsec to Trivy Migration As part of our goal to provide a comprehensive open source security solution for all, we have been consolidating all of our scanning related efforts in one place, and that is Trivy. Over the past year, tfsec has laid the foundations to Trivy's IaC & misconfigurations scanning capabilities, including Terraform scanning, which has been natively supported in Trivy for a long time now. Going forward we want to encourage the tfsec community to transition over to Trivy. Moving to Trivy gives you the same excellent Terraform scanning engine, with some extra benefits: 1. Access to more…
read the full tfsec overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kyverno or tfsec more popular?
kyverno has 8,316 GitHub stars and tfsec has 7,061. kyverno has the larger community by that measure.
Are kyverno and tfsec free?
Both are open source. kyverno is licensed under Apache-2.0 and tfsec under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kyverno and tfsec?
kyverno is written in Go and tfsec in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, kyverno or tfsec?
Choose kyverno if you want the larger community (8,316 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose tfsec if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.