Adoption & Ecosystem

Who uses it

The adopters below come from the central ADOPTERS.md in kubescape/project-governance; the CLI repository's own ADOPTERS.md redirects there. The file lists AWS, Energi Danmark, Gitpod, Intel, Orange Business, Rabobank, and VMware (Bitnami) as well-known companies, plus the use-case entries below.

Organisation	Use case	Source
Cox Communications	Security analysis of K8s best practices across CI pipelines for around 3,000 apps	ADOPTERS.md
Swisscom AG	Scanning Helm charts and manifests against the CIS framework	ADOPTERS.md
Schwarz IT (SIT)	Continuous compliance for edge Kubernetes clusters	ADOPTERS.md
Fusioncore.ai	Software Bill of Behavior	ADOPTERS.md
ARMO	Vulnerability monitoring	ADOPTERS.md

Adoption signals

Measured from the GitHub API on 2026-06-24 (repository):

• 11,492 stars, 950 forks, 72 open issues; repository created 2021-08-12.
• Contributors number roughly 205 (last page of the GitHub contributors API, anonymous included).
• Latest release v4.0.9, published 2026-05-29.
• Distribution channels: Homebrew, Krew, Chocolatey, install.sh, Helm (in-cluster), a GitHub Action, and a VS Code extension. The README carries an OpenSSF Best Practices badge (#6944) and a Scorecard badge.

Ecosystem

Related repositories in the kubescape org (observed via gh repo list kubescape, repository):

• regolibrary: the control set (NSA/CISA, MITRE, CIS) the scanner consumes, kept separate from the engine.
• node-agent: the eBPF runtime agent, which absorbed the host-sensor in 4.0.
• operator, kubevuln, kollector, storage, gateway, synchronizer: the in-cluster microservices, deployed by helm-charts.
• cel-admission-library: ready-made ValidatingAdmissionPolicy content; vscode-kubescape, lens-extension, headlamp-plugin, and github-action provide IDE and CI integration.

Integration points: Grype and Syft for CVE and SBOM data, Cosign/Sigstore for signature verification, Copacetic for image patching behind kubescape patch, Inspektor Gadget for eBPF runtime monitoring (per the README), and a Prometheus exporter.

Alternatives

These are real differences, not strawmen.

Alternative	Differs by
Trivy (Aqua)	Cross-artifact scanner (image, IaC, SBOM, secrets) with its own misconfiguration checks. Kubescape leans on framework compliance (NSA/CISA, MITRE, CIS) with risk and compliance scores and embeds Grype for image scanning.
kube-bench (Aqua)	Specialised in node-level CIS Kubernetes Benchmark checks. Kubescape includes CIS but spans workloads, manifests, Helm, IDE, and CI, and also does remediation and VAP generation.
Checkov / Polaris	Static checks of IaC and manifests. Runtime and in-cluster operators are out of their scope.
Falco (CNCF Graduated)	Specialised in runtime threat detection. Kubescape bundles posture, vulnerability, and runtime (via node-agent) into one platform, so it sits closer to complementary than competing.