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Distroless Alternatives
Similar projects and alternatives to distroless
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InfluxDB
InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads. InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
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Moby
The Moby Project - a collaborative project for the container ecosystem to assemble container-based systems
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
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trivy
Find vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, secrets, SBOM in containers, Kubernetes, code repositories, clouds and more
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Lean and Mean Docker containers
Slim(toolkit): Don't change anything in your container image and minify it by up to 30x (and for compiled languages even more) making it secure too! (free and open source)
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
NOTE:
The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives.
Hence, a higher number means a better distroless alternative or higher similarity.
distroless discussion
distroless reviews and mentions
Posts with mentions or reviews of distroless.
We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives
and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-05-20.
- Optimizing React Frontend Deployment: Security and Performance Analysis of Docker Base Images
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Stop using Docker like it’s your first dev job
Want extreme? Try distroless images from Google.
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Still Shipping 1GB Docker Images? Here’s How to Crush Them in Half an Hour
Distroless Images Minimal & secure
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Kubernetes Without Docker: Why Container Runtimes Are Changing the Game in 2025
Distroless Images by Google “No OS for you!” = fewer vulnerabilities, smaller images.
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Revisit base container image for AWS services
Debian slim and UBI are easy to use in the direction of creating a very small image while taking into account the use of a package manager, but on the other hand, they are too large to satisfy the demand to create a minimum image for a specific language environment. If you want to satisfy such a demand, Distroless image may be the right choice for you.
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Base Images: The Secret to Smaller Docker Images
As Google, the creator of distroless images, puts it, "Distroless images contain only your application and its runtime dependencies." You can read more about them here.
- Distroless: Language focused Docker images, minus the operating system
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Docker, Linux, Security. Kinda.
That's how we get distroless. Distroless base images follow the same pattern as alpine base docker images, as in, less functionality while still keeping enough functionality to be able to do the job and minimize the attack surface. Minimizing a base image like this means that the base images are very specialized so we have base images for golang, python, java and the like.
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Chainguard Images now available on Docker Hub
lots of questions here regarding what this product is. I guess i can provide some information for the context, from a perspective of an outside contributor.
Chainguard Images is a set of hardened container images.
They were built by the original team that brought you Google's Distroless (https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless)
However, there were few problems with Distroless:
1. distroless were based on Debian - which in turn, limited to Debian's release cadence for fixing CVE.
2. distroless is using bazelbuild, which is not exactly easy to contrib, customize, etc...
3. distroless images are hard to extend.
Chainguard built a new "undistro" OS for container workload, named Wolfi, using their OSS projects like melange (for packaging pkgs) and apko (for building images).
The idea is (from my understanding) is that
1. You don't have to rely on upstream to cut a release. Chainguard will be doing that, with lots of automation & guardrails in placed. This allow them to fix vulnerabilties extremely fast.
- Language focused Docker images, minus the operating system
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 23 May 2025
Stats
Basic distroless repo stats
130
20,501
8.9
5 days ago
GoogleContainerTools/distroless is an open source project licensed under Apache License 2.0 which is an OSI approved license.
The primary programming language of distroless is Starlark.
Sponsored
InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads
InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
www.influxdata.com