Chainguard Pricing Overview

Yes. According to G2 data, Chainguard offers a free plan with limited features. Users can upgrade to paid plans for additional capabilities. Visit the seller's official pricing page to compare plan options and features.

Chainguard's pricing is best suited for mid-market and enterprise organizations in regulated or security-sensitive industries. G2 reviewers from defense, financial services, healthcare, aviation, and government contracting dominate the review base, consistently citing FedRAMP, FIPS, and SOC2 compliance as primary drivers. The per-image tier fits teams adopting a targeted subset of hardened images, while the Catalog tier suits larger engineering organizations standardizing across all containerized workloads. G2 reviews indicate smaller teams find the cost challenging but still defensible when factoring in avoided engineering overhead. Chainguard Libraries pricing targets Python, Java, and JavaScript-heavy organizations facing software supply chain risk beyond container images alone.

Chainguard's free tier provides up to five container images per organization with unlimited pulls, SLSA L3 build infrastructure, Sigstore signing, and SBOMs, but only covers upstream-supported versions and excludes EOL images, FIPS-validated images, STIG-hardened images, and EmeritOSS images. G2 reviewers note the free tier is limited to latest tags, making it unsuitable for production environments requiring pinned or stable versions. Chainguard's paid tiers add contractual CVE SLAs (7 days critical, 14 days high/med/low), FIPS and STIG access, EOL grace periods, Custom Assembly tooling, a private APK repository, console-based management, and full catalog access. The Catalog tier further adds the ability to request net-new images at no additional cost.

G2 reviewers broadly consider Chainguard a premium but justified investment. High ratings averaging 4.5/5 coexist with recurring cost complaints, particularly around per-image pricing. Multiple G2 reviewers from mid-market and small business segments flag the cost as steep, with one noting a costly mistake purchasing an unneeded image. Yet the same reviewers consistently cite strong ROI: eliminating engineer hours spent on CVE triage, accelerating FedRAMP and FIPS compliance, and reducing vulnerability counts by 70-80%. G2 reviews of Chainguard from defense, financial services, and healthcare enterprises frame the pricing as worthwhile given contractual CVE SLAs and supply chain security guarantees that would cost far more to replicate internally.