head to head · open source
trivy vs chef
trivy has 37,969 GitHub stars, 692 forks, 269 open issues and last shipped yesterday. chef has 8,238 stars, 2,519 forks, 411 open issues and last shipped yesterday. trivy leads on adoption by 361% (37,969 vs 8,238 stars). trivy is written in Go under Apache-2.0; chef is written in Ruby under Apache-2.0. trivy has attracted 2% as many forks as stars, chef 31%. trivy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (hacktoberfest), 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
| trivy | chef | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 38K | ★ 8.2K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 692 | ⑂ 2.5K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick trivy if
- You weight community size — 38K 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 chef if
- You want the chef feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You evaluated both and chef fits your workflow better
About trivy
Trivy is an open source security scanner written in Go and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It is an Aqua Security open source project, hosted at trivy.dev, and it lives in the cloud native and DevSecOps ecosystem alongside container runtimes, Kubernetes clusters, and infrastructure as code tooling. The design separates two ideas: scanners, which describe the classes of security issue Trivy looks for, and targets, which describe where it looks. The README presents the project as a comprehensive and versatile scanner, and the topic list — containers, devsecops, docker, iac, infrastructure as code, kubernetes…
read the full trivy overview →
About chef
Chef Infra configuration management tool for automating infrastructure configuration, deployment, and management across any environment, at any scale, for DevOps engineers and infrastructure teams.
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Frequently asked questions
Is trivy or chef more popular?
trivy has 37,969 GitHub stars and chef has 8,238. trivy has the larger community by that measure.
Are trivy and chef free?
Both are open source. trivy is licensed under Apache-2.0 and chef under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between trivy and chef?
trivy is written in Go and chef in Ruby. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, trivy or chef?
Choose trivy if you want the larger community (37,969 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose chef if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.