Falco vs Syft
GitHub Stats
About Falco
Falco is a cloud-native runtime security tool originally created by Sysdig and now a CNCF graduated project. It monitors system calls in real-time using eBPF or a kernel module to detect abnormal behavior, intrusions, and data theft in containers, Kubernetes clusters, and Linux hosts. Falco ships with a comprehensive rule set covering the MITRE ATT&CK framework, detecting events like shell spawning in containers, unauthorized process execution, sensitive file access, network connections to suspicious destinations, and privilege escalation attempts. Rules are written in a human-readable YAML format and can be customized to match any organization's security requirements. Falco integrates with Kubernetes admission controllers to enforce security policies at deploy time, and its output can be routed to Slack, PagerDuty, SIEM systems, or any webhook endpoint for alerting.
About Syft
Syft is a CLI tool and Go library from Anchore for generating a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) from container images and filesystems. It catalogues all packages, libraries, and dependencies present in a container image or directory, producing structured output in SPDX, CycloneDX, or Syft's native JSON format. Syft supports package detection for Alpine (apk), Debian (dpkg), Red Hat (rpm), Python (pip/poetry/pipenv), JavaScript (npm/yarn), Java (Maven/Gradle), Go modules, Rust (Cargo), Ruby (Gems), .NET (NuGet), and many other package ecosystems. SBOMs are increasingly required for software supply chain security compliance, and Syft integrates with Grype (Anchore's vulnerability scanner) to check the generated SBOM against known vulnerability databases. This pairing provides a complete supply chain security workflow: know what you're running (Syft) and whether it's vulnerable (Grype).
Platform Support
Tags
Falco only
Syft only