The 2025 Container Security Platform Landscape: What You Need to Know

Application security leaders are constantly balancing speed, scalability, and operability when it comes to securing modern development environments — which is why many turn to container security for a foundational, inside-out approach to protecting applications. This shift has become even more critical as cloud-native architectures continue to evolve. While Kubernetes, microservices, and ephemeral workloads have revolutionized deployment, they’ve also opened new attack surfaces that traditional security tools can’t cover, including attacks through AI-generated code and images to deliver malware. If your team doesn’t have visibility into container configurations, runtime behavior, and continuous integration/delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, you’re flying blind and running the risk of falling victim to an attack before you even are aware of nefarious activity.

With these challenges in mind, today we are taking a look at where container security currently stands – we’ll unpack the challenges currently faced with the AI craze and determine the best practices for security teams to ensure your organization is future-proofing its container security solution . Whether you’re optimizing your existing stack or planning your next investment, this guide is here to help you make the right calls.

Increasing Attacks with AI-Generated Code and Images

Agentic AI tooling is increasingly being used in CI/CD pipelines, but unfortunately threat actors are seeing the same opportunity to leverage AI in injecting malicious code into public container images/open source repositories. The scale and sophistication of these threats has increased significantly as AI technology continues its advancement. Gone are the days of blindly trusting community resources for development. To maintain an emphasis on secure development in the age of advanced AI, security teams should consider the following:

• Integrate code, container, and cloud posture into a unified Cloud-Native Application Protection (CNAPP) platform
  
• Increase focus on software supply chain integrity and Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) generation
  
• Consider agentless scanning and developer-first security workflows

Open Source vs. Commercial Container Security Tools

Most AppSec leaders have reached a crossroads between building with : do you build your container security program with battle-tested open source components, or investing in an all-in-one commercial platform.? The correct path isn’t binary—it depends on the team’s skills, infrastructure, and risk tolerance.

Let’s start with open source. Tools like Trivy, Falco, Dockle, kube-bench, and Gitleaks have earned their stripes in security-conscious DevOps pipelines. They’re powerful, flexible, and, importantly, free. For organizations with seasoned DevSecOps engineers, open source can be a great way to fine-tune security to your environment. But there’s a catch. Managing, integrating, and maintaining a patchwork of tools requires significant time and expertise. You’ll get transparency and control, but without enterprise support or unified dashboards, your team may spend more time stitching tools together than acting on findings.

On the other end of the spectrum are commercial platforms like Checkmarx, Sysdig, Prisma Cloud, Aqua, Wiz, and Snyk. These offer a polished experience: integrated dashboards, prioritized alerts, policy enforcement, and compliance reporting baked in. For teams prioritizing scalability, developer enablement, and runtime visibility, these solutions reduce friction and help you operationalize container security faster. The trade-off? Licensing costs and the need to vet for vendor lock-in.

If your program is maturing, or you’re responsible for protecting multiple teams across a sprawling DevOps environment, commercial tools deliver cohesion and clarity. For lean teams with hands-on security engineers, open source can still be a strong foundation.

Bottom line, your choice should align with the capabilities of your team and the criticality of your workloads. And in many cases, a hybrid approach provides the best of both worlds.

Container Security Essentials 

We’ve developed a comprehensive checklist to help application security leaders embrace container security, but for now, let’s consider the most essential capabilities that need to be included:

1. Image Vulnerability Scanning

Find known CVEs in base images, packages, and libraries. Look for tools that offer integration into CI/CD pipelines to prevent vulnerable builds from shipping.

2. Runtime Protection

Detect malicious behavior during container execution—like crypto mining or container escapes. 

3. Policy and Misconfiguration Detection

Audit Dockerfiles, Kubernetes manifests, and Helm charts for insecure configurations. At Checkmarx, our  Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) Security solution scans IaC files and  supports early detection of misconfigurations with immediate feedback.

4. CI/CD Integration

Shift security left by embedding scans directly into developer workflows. Seek out solutions that prioritize developer experience to ensure your team(s) are engaged and performing optimally.

5. Kubernetes Security Posture Management (KSPM)

Continuously monitor K8s environments for Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) issues, privilege escalation risks, and insecure workloads.

These are just the basics of what a robust container security program should entail, so let’s dig into how different types of tools address these needs, and what that means for your strategy. The next section breaks down the trade-offs between open source and commercial container security solutions, helping you evaluate which approach best fits your team’s capabilities and priorities.

Best Container Security Tools by Use Case

Choosing the right  tools to support your container security program isn’t about finding the “best” one in a vacuum. It’s about selecting the right fit for your specific needs across the software development lifecycle (SDLC). The reality is, no single platform can do everything perfectly. Instead, AppSec teams must match tools to the challenges they face at each phase of development, deployment, and runtime.

Let’s walk through how this plays out in practice:

When your team is building container images, your priority is catching known vulnerabilities early. Tools like Checkmarx excel at scanning images in CI/CD pipelines, flagging insecure packages and outdated dependencies before they ever reach production.

Once those containers are live, your focus shifts to runtime behavior. That’s where tools like Falco, Sysdig Secure, and Aqua come in by alerting on suspicious activity, detecting container escapes, and watching for signs of compromise.

Secrets present another layer of risk. Whether hardcoded into a Dockerfile or accidentally bundled in an image layer, leaked credentials can be disastrous. Checkmarx, Gitleaks, and Trivy help detect these before they lead to breaches.

What about the configurations that define your containers and infrastructure? Tools like Checkmarx’s IaC scanning, Dockle, and kube-bench audit your Dockerfiles and K8s manifests, ensuring compliance with container security best practices.

Then there’s the broader security posture of your Kubernetes environment. Platforms like Wiz, Prisma Cloud, and Checkmarx offer insights into misconfigured RBAC roles, insecure workloads, and privilege escalation risks.

For security to truly shift left, it must integrate into the CI/CD process. Tools like Checkmarx, Snyk, and GitLab Secure meet developers where they work: inside their pipelines and pull requests.

Finally, for organizations seeking complete visibility across code, containers, and cloud, CNAPP platforms offer a unified solution. Combinations like Checkmarx + Sysdig deliver correlated insights across the full application lifecycle.

A hybrid approach is often the most practical: use open source tools for targeted needs, and complement them with a platform to gain integrated coverage and developer-first remediation. The right mix depends on your architecture, risk profile, and team maturity, but aligning tools to use cases will always beat chasing features in isolation.

As you conduct your container security software comparison, align your selection with:

• Development velocity: How much shift-left integration do you need?
• Runtime exposure: Do you require deep behavioral monitoring in production?
• Compliance mandates: Will your platform help automate reporting and attestation?
• Team capacity: Can your team manage open source tools, or do you need vendor support?

If your AppSec team is stretched thin but needs comprehensive visibility, Checkmarx provides a powerful, developer-friendly platform that bridges code, containers, and cloud-native security needs.

Container Security, One Layer at a Time

Container security is complex, but the tools available in 2025 make it more manageable and automated than ever before. Whether you’re hardening Kubernetes clusters or baking security into CI/CD, the right platform – or combination of tools – can drastically improve your posture.

For AppSec teams prioritizing scalability, developer experience, and runtime protection, Checkmarx Container Security offers one of the most complete solutions on the market.

By choosing the best container security tools for your use cases and understanding their strengths, you’ll be well equipped to protect your applications from build to deployment and beyond.

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