head to head · open source
trivy vs kcl
trivy has 37,961 GitHub stars, 691 forks, 269 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kcl has 2,415 stars, 170 forks, 19 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. trivy leads on adoption by 1,472% (37,961 vs 2,415 stars). trivy is written in Go under Apache-2.0; kcl is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. trivy has attracted 2% as many forks as stars, kcl 7%. trivy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (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 | kcl | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 38K | ★ 2.4K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-15 |
| Forks | ⑂ 691 | ⑂ 170 |
| 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 kcl if
- You want the kcl feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and kcl 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 kcl
KCL is an open source, constraint based record and functional language, hosted as a CNCF Sandbox project and licensed under Apache 2.0, for platform engineers, DevOps teams, and cloud native practitioners who need to write, validate, and manage complex configuration without hand maintaining raw YAML or JSON.
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Frequently asked questions
Is trivy or kcl more popular?
trivy has 37,961 GitHub stars and kcl has 2,415. trivy has the larger community by that measure.
Are trivy and kcl free?
Both are open source. trivy is licensed under Apache-2.0 and kcl under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between trivy and kcl?
trivy is written in Go and kcl in Rust. 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 kcl?
Choose trivy if you want the larger community (37,961 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose kcl if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.