head to head · open source
trivy vs crossplane
trivy has 37,961 GitHub stars, 691 forks, 269 open issues and last shipped yesterday. crossplane has 12,083 stars, 1,264 forks, 194 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. trivy leads on adoption by 214% (37,961 vs 12,083 stars). trivy is written in Go under Apache-2.0; crossplane is written in Go under Apache-2.0. trivy has attracted 2% as many forks as stars, crossplane 10%. trivy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (containers, infrastructure-as-code, kubernetes), 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 | crossplane | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 38K | ★ 12K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-15 |
| Forks | ⑂ 691 | ⑂ 1.3K |
| 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 crossplane if
- You want the crossplane feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and crossplane 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 crossplane
Crossplane is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation framework for building cloud native control planes without writing code, aimed at platform and infrastructure teams that run Kubernetes and need to orchestrate applications and infrastructure across clouds through declarative APIs.
read the full crossplane overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is trivy or crossplane more popular?
trivy has 37,961 GitHub stars and crossplane has 12,083. trivy has the larger community by that measure.
Are trivy and crossplane free?
Both are open source. trivy is licensed under Apache-2.0 and crossplane under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between trivy and crossplane?
trivy is written in Go and crossplane 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, trivy or crossplane?
Choose trivy if you want the larger community (37,961 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose crossplane if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.