Architecture comparison
Stella Ops vs Trivy
Trivy is a scanner: it produces findings across almost anything you point it at. Stella Ops is a release control plane for non-Kubernetes estates: it turns findings about container digests into gated, signed, replayable release decisions. Many estates run both.
Scope note: this comparison also covers Grype-class scanners — the same category difference applies to Grype and Syft-based pipelines.
Last reviewed: 2026-07-26
Decision criteria
How this comparison is evaluated
Each vendor page is scored against the same five technical dimensions for consistent decision support.
- Deployment model: Target coverage, self-hosting posture, and runtime assumptions.
- Evidence model: How decisions are justified, signed, and exported for review.
- Replayability: Ability to re-run historical decisions with identical inputs.
- Offline capability: Behavior in disconnected or sovereign environments.
- Policy model: Gate expressiveness, explainability, and workflow integration.
Proof and methodology links: Full market matrix | Evidence and Audit | Operations and Deployment | Decision Capsule spec
Different categories: findings versus decisions
- Trivy — answers "what is inside this artifact, and what of it is known-vulnerable?". Its output is a findings list you triage elsewhere.
- Stella Ops — answers "may this digest be promoted to this environment, and can we prove why?". Its output is a decision linked to signed evidence.
Both can be true in one stack. Stella imports SBOMs produced by Trivy, Syft, and Grype, so adopting one does not mean discarding the other.
Dimension-by-dimension comparison
| Decision dimension | Trivy | Stella Ops |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment model | Single-binary scanner for container images, filesystems, git repositories, VM images, Kubernetes clusters, and SBOMSoftware Bill of Materials - a complete list of all packages and dependencies in your software input. Deployment orchestration is out of scope. | Self-hosted release control plane for non-Kubernetes estates: Docker Compose, SSH/WinRM hosts. It scans container images and imported SBOMs — it does not scan repositories, VMs, or clusters. |
| Evidence model | Reports for humans and pipelines: JSON, SARIF, and SBOM output (CycloneDXAn open standard format for software bill of materials (SBOM) used across the industry, SPDXSoftware Package Data Exchange - another open standard format for SBOMs, widely used in open source). | Signed DSSEDead Simple Signing Envelope - a simple, flexible standard for signing arbitrary data with cryptographic signatures artifacts: reachability graphs, verdicts, and exportable Decision CapsuleA signed, exportable evidence bundle that seals every input and output of a release decision for offline audit and deterministic replay bundles. |
| Replayability | N/S — a replay manifest that re-runs a past decision on pinned inputs is not stated in Trivy's public documentation. In our source review of Trivy v0.55, findings tracked the advisory-database state at scan time. | Deterministic replay manifests pin the advisory snapshot, policy, and analyzer versions, so a past verdict can be re-run and compared bit for bit. |
| Offline capability | Yes — the vulnerability database can be mirrored for disconnected scanning. | Yes — sealed advisory snapshots; each verdict records the snapshot it was computed from, giving air-gapped estates parity with connected ones. |
| Policy model | Severity thresholds and exit codes; VEXVulnerability Exploitability eXchange - machine-readable statements about whether vulnerabilities are actually exploitable in your context statements filter findings out of reports. | Gates combine ReachabilityAnalysis that proves whether vulnerable code is actually called by your application — filtering out false positives from scanner noise, VEXVulnerability Exploitability eXchange - machine-readable statements about whether vulnerabilities are actually exploitable in your context decisioning and promotion rules. Conflicting issuer claims resolve under K4 — Belnap four-valued logic, where a claim is True, False, Unknown, or Conflict — so a contradiction is recorded as a conflict instead of one side silently winning. Unknowns are a tracked, budgeted state, never hidden. |
Yes = native capability | Partial = constrained scope | No = not provided | N/S = not stated in public documentation
Measured results: four scanners, 872 projects
872 projects from a 1,002-project open-source manifest, each built from source into a container image and scanned by all four tools from identical inputs. Last scored 3 July 2026. How findings are truth-labelled and what is excluded is stated in the methodology note at the bottom of this page.
96.3% of advisory-declared vulnerabilities found — Trivy found 54.6%.
When a published advisory names your version as affected, Stella Ops reports it. Fewer known problems reach production unseen.
476,865 packages identified across the corpus — Trivy identified 304,230.
A package no scanner sees is a package nobody can check. Stella Ops sees more of what is actually inside the image.
| Measure | Stella Ops | Trivy | Grype | osv-scanner |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Advisory-declared vulnerabilities found* The published advisory names this exact version as affected. Did the tool report it? | 96.3% | 54.6% | 70.3% | 89.2% |
| Packages found in the image Distinct OS, language and binary packages (PURLs) identified across the whole corpus. | 476,865 | 304,230 | not scored | not scored |
* Truth labels for this measure come from the same advisory store that Stella Ops' own matcher reads, so this tier is favourable to Stella Ops by construction — our benchmark code classifies it that way. The corpus and scoring rules are published, so the run can be reproduced.
False-positive control tied four ways at 1.00: no tool produced a confirmed false positive. Package discovery was scored for Stella Ops and Trivy only in this run.
Snyk was not part of this run; we have no measured comparison against Snyk. The corpus, scoring rules, audit rules, and per-project artifacts are published in the product repository under tools/benchmarks/stella-vs-trivy/.
Fit guidance by deployment and evidence needs
When Trivy is the better choice
Choose Trivy — or keep it — when scanning breadth is the requirement:
- You want one binary that scans container images, filesystems, git repositories, VM images, Kubernetes clusters, and existing SBOMs.
- You need misconfiguration, secret, or license scanning in the same run.
- You value a large plugin and IDE ecosystem with broad CI examples.
- You prefer Apache-2.0 licensing. (Stella Ops is BUSL-1.1, source-available.)
Stella Ops does not scan git repositories, VM images, or Kubernetes clusters, and it does not do secret discovery inside artifacts. For that coverage you need a scanner like Trivy — with or without Stella behind it.
When Stella Ops is the better choice
Choose Stella when the question is not "what is vulnerable?" but "may this ship, and can we prove why?":
- Verdicts must be re-runnable: deterministic replay manifests pin every input, so a decision from months ago can be reproduced and verified.
- Findings must be ranked by exploitability: signed reachability graphs (
DSSEDead Simple Signing Envelope - a simple, flexible standard for signing arbitrary data with cryptographic signatures) evidence whether vulnerable code sits on a path your application can execute. VEXVulnerability Exploitability eXchange - machine-readable statements about whether vulnerabilities are actually exploitable in your contextshould decide, not suppress: trust-weighted conflict resolution keeps disagreeing statements visible instead of deleting findings.- Uncertainty must stay visible: unknowns are a first-class, budgeted state, not a silent gap.
- Air-gapped estates need parity: sealed advisory snapshots produce the same verdicts offline as online.
Use both: Trivy for breadth, Stella for decisions
Replacement is not the only story. Keep Trivy for repository, VM, Kubernetes, secret, and misconfiguration coverage. Export its SBOMSoftware Bill of Materials - a complete list of all packages and dependencies in your software and let Stella compute the reachability-filtered, policy-gated verdict — and the signed evidence — for the digests you promote.
Import a Trivy-generated SBOM into a Stella scan:
$ stella sbom check --sbom trivy.json
Commands as shown in the product console (v1.0-RC1).
Methodology: Feature statements come from each vendor's public documentation plus a source review of the release named on this page. Measured statements come from our own scanner benchmark, last scored on 3 July 2026: 872 scored projects from a 1,002-project open-source manifest, each built from source into a container image and scanned by Stella Ops, Trivy, Grype and osv-scanner from identical inputs. Scoring is against a rule-derived truth label — the advisory's own affected version range, or agreement between independent advisory lineages — never against another scanner's output. Findings the rules cannot resolve are excluded from precision and recall and reported as coverage instead; projects that failed to build, and scans that failed to run, are excluded rather than counted as wins. On that run Stella Ops led advisory-range recall and package discovery, and tied on confirmed false positives. We have no measured comparison against Snyk. The corpus, the scoring rules and the raw counts are published in the product repository under tools/benchmarks/stella-vs-trivy/. Capabilities change; verify current behaviour with each vendor. Replayability statements are based on a source review of Trivy v0.55; other Trivy cells reflect Trivy's public documentation.
If you believe any information is outdated or incorrect, please contact hello@stella-ops.org.
Compare on one of your own digests
Scan the same image with both tools. Put the findings list next to the reachability-filtered verdict and its exported evidence, and judge the difference on your own artifact.