Tools/goharbor/harbor

Harbor

Trusted cloud native container registry

29.1k ★+51/wkgrowthGoApache License 2.0 →trending

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The Lens

By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.

Updated Mar 2026

Harbor is an enterprise-grade container registry you host yourself.

Harbor does what Docker Hub does, but on your infrastructure. Push images, pull images, scan them for CVEs (Trivy integration), sign them (Cosign/Notary), replicate them across registries, and control who can access what with RBAC. It's a CNCF graduated project used by serious Kubernetes operations. This is production infrastructure, not a toy.

Completely free. Apache 2.0 license. No paid tier. Small teams running Kubernetes in production who need image security (vulnerability scanning, access control) should seriously consider Harbor. The alternative is trusting Docker Hub or paying for a cloud registry.

The catch: Harbor is not lightweight. It runs PostgreSQL, Redis, and several microservices. Minimum recommended is 4 GB RAM and 2 CPUs. Setup is doable with Docker Compose or Helm, but maintaining it (backups, upgrades, storage management) is real ops work.

Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid

fully free

Free

Everything. Apache 2.0 license. CNCF graduated project. No enterprise edition.

What You Get

Docker and OCI image registry
Vulnerability scanning (Trivy)
Image signing (Cosign, Notary)
RBAC and LDAP/OIDC authentication
Image replication across registries
Garbage collection
Helm chart repository
Web UI and REST API

vs Managed Registries

Docker Hub Pro: $5/mo per user, rate-limited pulls on free tier
AWS ECR: $0.10/GB/month storage + data transfer
Google Artifact Registry: $0.10/GB/month
GitHub Container Registry: Free for public images, included with GitHub plan for private

Self-Hosted Cost

Harbor needs a decent server: 4 GB RAM, 2 CPUs, SSD storage. A $20-40/mo VPS handles a small team. Storage grows with your image count. Plan for 50-200 GB to start.

Fully free software. Self-hosting costs $20-40/mo for infrastructure. Cheaper than managed registries at scale, more work to maintain.

Self-hosting ops:significant

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Score

88/100 · A

Adoption27/30

Maintenance25/25

Community11/20

License15/15

Analysis10/10

A low score is not a verdict on quality. Young and niche tools start low by design. How we calculate scores

Trust Signals

High adoption: 28,278 starsActive community: 5,199 forksPermissive license (Apache-2.0)

About

Stars: 29,109
Forks: 5,313

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