What is a CNAPP?
A cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) is a unified solution that secures applications throughout their lifecycle. It combines core functions such as vulnerability management, configuration scanning, identity analysis, and runtime protection to eliminate silos and improve visibility.
While open-source software (OSS) security tools cover individual security domains, they don’t provide complete, end-to-end protection across the application lifecycle. Gartner recognizes this gap, predicting that, “By 2029, 40% of enterprises that successfully implement zero trust within cloud service provider environments will rely on the advanced visibility and control capabilities offered by CNAPP solutions.”
CNAPPs provide flexibility, lower costs, and transparency.
CNAPP solution categories
Security teams must ensure that a CNAPP’s essential capabilities include the following types of solutions:
Cloud security posture management (CSPM)
Cloud workload protection platform (CWPP), including virtual machine (VM) and container security
Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM)
Application security testing (AST)
Cloud detection and response (CDR)
Organizations have access to a wide range of open-source security tools that address individual CNAPP domains—but few offer the full breadth of capabilities a single, comprehensive solution provides. This is why commercial CNAPPs stand out for their seamless interoperability, centralized control, and support for multi-cloud environments.
Below, we'll highlight a few of the most popular and trusted open-source tools in each security category, then discuss where CNAPPs fit.
2025 Gartner® Market Guide for CNAPP
The 2025 Gartner® Market Guide for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) explores this shift and outlines what security leaders should consider as the market matures.
Cloud security posture management
CSPM tools continuously monitor cloud environments to identify misconfigurations, compliance gaps, and vulnerabilities. These solutions also help teams enforce security best practices and align with regulatory frameworks by providing clear visibility into cloud posture and actionable insights.
Below are three key open-source CSPM tools for auditing and improving cloud security.
1. OpenSCAP
OpenSCAP is an open-source tool that helps security teams verify system compliance and automate vulnerability assessments using SCAP standards.
Key features:
The tool scans systems against security baselines to verify that configurations align with NIST and other frameworks.
It automates compliance checks by running scheduled scans and producing audit-ready reports.
What to look out for:
It lacks native support for cloud services and focuses primarily on operating systems.
Teams must manually configure it to support multi-cloud or container environments.
Popular with: Teams that are enforcing host compliance in hybrid or on-premises environments
2. Scout Suite
Scout Suite is an open-source auditing tool that scans public cloud environments using provider APIs to uncover misconfigurations and security risks.
Key features:
The solution performs security scans across AWS, Azure, GCP, and Alibaba Cloud to detect excessive permissions and misconfigured resources.
Scout Suite also generates interactive reports that categorize findings by severity and guide remediation efforts.
What to look out for:
It performs only point-in-time analysis without continuous monitoring.
The tool lacks native support for automated remediation or real-time alerting.
Popular with: Security teams that are conducting manual audits across multi-cloud environments
3. Steampipe
Steampipe is an open‑source platform that allows teams to query cloud APIs, services, and configuration data using standard SQL. It supports numerous plug-ins for cloud providers (such as AWS, Azure, GCP, and broader systems), enabling auditor‑style queries into security posture and compliance.
Key features:
The tool enables live SQL queries against APIs and cloud metadata, allowing you to slice and analyze your infrastructure without ETL.
Steampipe supports an extensible plug-in library and configuration model, which allows you to tailor checks and build dashboards for security and compliance.
It exposes configuration and service data in a table format, which allows teams to craft custom queries for risk, misconfigurations, or identity issues.
What to look out for:
The tool primarily offers query and analytics capabilities and doesn’t include built‑in continuous monitoring or automated remediation.
It takes time and SQL skills to craft meaningful queries and reports that cover the entire cloud security posture.
Popular with: Security teams that want flexible custom querying of cloud infrastructure and are comfortable writing SQL to explore risk
Cloud workload protection platform
CWPP solutions protect cloud‑based applications and workloads from threats across the development, test, and runtime phases. These tools support a shift‑left model, enabling DevOps and SecOps teams to embed security into their SDLC and runtime workflows.
Below are several CWPP tools categorized into two groups: general and Kubernetes solutions.
General CWPP tools
The following two tools provide broad workload protection across hosts, containers, and VMs, rather than being limited to Kubernetes or container image scanning.
1. Tripwire
Tripwire (Open Source Tripwire) is a host‑based file integrity monitoring and change‑detection tool that tracks system files and alerts when unexpected modifications occur.
Key features:
The tool monitors file‑ and directory‑level integrity by comparing current state against a baseline to detect unauthorized changes.
The solution reports who was responsible, what was happening, and when changes occurred, supporting audit readiness for compliance frameworks.
Tripwire provides alerting for deviations from the known-good state to facilitate early detection of intrusions or misuse.
What to look out for:
The open-source tool primarily targets file system and host changes and lacks built‑in container or cloud-native workload awareness.
It requires manual baselining and may not scale out of the box for dynamic cloud/CI environments.
Popular with: Teams that are protecting legacy servers or a hybrid infrastructure where file integrity monitoring is a key control
2. Wazuh
Wazuh is an open‑source security platform that supports host‑based intrusion detection, threat detection, log analysis, and endpoint and workload protection across cloud and containerized environments.
Key features:
The tool aggregates logs, events, and telemetry from hosts, containers, and cloud workloads to detect threats and anomalous behavior.
Wazuh integrates file integrity monitoring, intrusion detection, and vulnerability detection across environments, including containers.
The platform supports scalable deployment via agents and containers for mixed, cloud-native workloads.
What to look out for:
The solution may require additional operational overhead to tune rules, agents, and integrations that cover all workload types.
It doesn’t specifically focus on container image scanning or supply chain vulnerabilities, which may require complementary tools.
Popular with: Security teams that need unified host and workload monitoring across traditional servers, containers, and cloud environments
Kubernetes and container‑specific CWPP tools
These three tools specialize in container image scanning, runtime container and Kubernetes monitoring, and supply chain vulnerability detection in cloud-native applications.
1. Clair
Clair is an open‑source static analysis engine that scans container images (like OCI and Docker) for known vulnerabilities by analyzing image layers and package metadata.
Key features:
The tool indexes container images layer by layer to identify vulnerable OS packages and dependencies before deployment.
Clair continuously updates and matches vulnerability metadata, allowing teams to detect new risks in existing images.
The platform provides an API for integrating into registries or CI/CD pipelines to automate scanning workflows.
What to look out for:
It focuses on static image analysis and doesn’t provide runtime behavior monitoring or detection of active exploits.
Clair may require the deployment or setup of supporting infrastructure (such as a vulnerability database or indexing service) for full usage.
Popular with: DevSecOps teams that are scanning container images as part of their CI/CD pipelines and looking for early vulnerability detection
2. Trivy
Trivy is an open‑source vulnerability scanner for container images, file systems, IaC artifacts, and Git repositories. It offers fast, comprehensive scanning for DevSecOps.
Key features:
The tool scans container images, file systems, and Git repos to detect OS packages, application dependencies, misconfigurations, and secrets.
The solution integrates easily into CI/CD pipelines with minimal setup, enabling shift‑left scanning for developers.
Trivy delivers rapid scan times with broad coverage of artifacts and environments, including container registries and Kubernetes.
What to look out for:
It emphasizes scanning and may lack full runtime protection or advanced threat detection in containers.
Trivy may produce large volumes of findings that require prioritization and integration with remediation workflows.
Popular with: Developer teams that are seeking lightweight, broad scanning of container and infrastructure artifacts early in the build process
3. ThreatMapper
ThreatMapper is an open‑source, cloud-native security observability platform that scans workloads, images, containers, and serverless functions to map attack paths across multi‑cloud environments.
Key features:
ThreatMapper discovers assets and computes attack paths across container runtime, serverless functions, and cloud workloads to visualize end‑to‑end risk.
The solution performs vulnerability scanning of running infrastructure and images, prioritizing threats based on exploitability and context.
The platform supports multi-cloud and container orchestration environments by deploying sensors across platforms, such as Kubernetes, Amazon ECS, and AWS Fargate.
What to look out for:
It’s more complex to deploy in production than simpler image scanners and may require more infrastructure and tuning.
The tool emphasizes risk discovery and visualization but may not natively cover all remediation automation or runtime blocking controls.
Popular with: Cloud security teams that are looking for a container- and serverless‑aware threat map and prioritized vulnerability and attack‑path analysis across environments
The IDC MarketScape for CNAPP
The report analyzes the capabilities and strategies of major CNAPP vendors worldwide, positioning them based on current product execution and long-term strategic alignment.
Cloud infrastructure entitlement management
CIEM solutions help you manage and control access to cloud resources and data by governing permissions, identities, and entitlement risks across environments. Below are a few CEIMs.
1. Open Policy Agent (OPA)
Open Policy Agent is an open‑source, general‑purpose policy engine that helps teams define and enforce access and configuration policies across their cloud infrastructure.
Key features:
OPA lets you write policies as code in the Rego language and enforce those rules across applications, services, and infrastructure.
The solution supports unified policy enforcement across diverse systems, including Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, APIs, and infrastructure components.
The platform decouples policy decision‑making from service logic to maintain the consistency and auditability of your access controls.
What to look out for:
It requires engineering effort to design, author, and maintain policies in Rego and integrate enforcement across your stack.
The tool doesn’t include built-in user management, identity federation, or entitlement workflows, so you’ll need to pair it with other systems for full CIEM.
Popular with: Security teams that want to codify and enforce fine‑grained access and configuration controls across their hybrid and multi‑cloud environments
2. Keycloak
Keycloak is an open-source identity and access management (IAM) platform that supports single sign‑on, user federation, and fine‑grained authorization policies for applications and services.
Key features:
The tool provides centralized IAM by supporting SSO, social login, user federation, and protocols like OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and SAML.
Keycloak enables fine‑grained permissions and role‑based access control through its authorization services and admin console.
The platform supports extensible identity flows and integrations, allowing teams to connect existing directories, customize authentication, and embed it into cloud-native apps.
What to look out for:
It focuses primarily on user identity and access rather than identifying excessive permissions or entitlement sprawl across cloud resource services.
Keycloak may require significant configuration and governance overhead to scale across multiple cloud providers and enterprise‑scale entitlements.
Popular with: Organizations that need a robust, open‑source IAM foundation that handles authentication, federation, and authorization for cloud services and applications
Application security testing
AST solutions scan code, applications, and dependencies to identify security vulnerabilities early in the software development lifecycle.
The three most common AST techniques are static application security testing (SAST), dynamic application security testing (DAST), and software composition analysis. Open-source tools in this category allow teams to shift security left and improve code quality before deployment.
These four tools help developers detect and fix vulnerabilities in source code, applications, and dependencies before pushing changes to production.
1. PMD
PMD is an open-source static code analyzer that detects common programming flaws in Java, Apex, and other languages.
Key features:
PMD scans source code for anti-patterns, bad practices, and code smells, such as unused variables, empty catch blocks, and duplicate code.
The solution supports multiple languages and IDE plugins, making it easy for teams to integrate it into development workflows and CI/CD pipelines.
The platform provides customizable rule sets and automated fixes to enforce team coding standards and improve maintainability.
What to look out for:
It focuses on code quality rather than in-depth security testing.
Teams must tune rulesets to balance between helpful feedback and noise.
Popular with: Development teams using Java or Apex that want to catch bugs and enforce code quality as part of early QA
2. ZAP
Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) is an open-source DAST tool maintained by OWASP that performs automated and manual web app penetration testing.
Key features:
The tool simulates real-world attacks to identify vulnerabilities like SQL injection, XSS, and broken authentication in live applications.
The solution supports automated scanning and interactive testing with a GUI, API, and plug-in marketplace.
ZAP integrates with CI/CD tools and enables DevSecOps teams to catch security issues post-deployment.
What to look out for:
It only works on running applications and requires a test environment.
The application may generate false positives without tuning or manual review.
Popular with: Teams that want to automate security testing for web apps as part of integration or staging environments
3. Bandit
Bandit is an open-source static analysis tool that scans Python code for common security issues.
Key features:
Bandit inspects Python source files using an abstract syntax tree to detect insecure patterns like hard-coded passwords and unsafe imports.
The solution provides flexible reporting options, including JSON and HTML, which makes it easy for teams to integrate it into CI workflows.
The tool allows teams to customize rules and severity levels to match specific security policies.
What to look out for:
It supports Python only.
Teams must tune rulesets to reduce noise and prioritize actionable issues.
Popular with: Python developers who want to catch security flaws early and integrate scanning into CI/CD pipelines
4. SonarQube Community Edition
SonarQube Community Edition is the free, open-source version of the SonarQube platform for static code analysis and quality enforcement.
Key features:
The tool scans codebases across multiple languages to detect bugs, code smells, and basic security vulnerabilities.
SonarQube integrates with GitHub, Jenkins, and other CI tools to provide developers with immediate feedback in their workflows.
The platform provides dashboards and historical trend data, enabling teams to track code quality and enforce standards over time.
What to look out for:
The Community Edition offers basic security rules, while advanced security rules are only available in paid versions.
Large, multi-language projects may need tuning to reduce noise and manage scale.
Popular with: Teams that are looking for a free, extensible SAST solution with broad language support and strong DevOps integration
Cloud detection and response
CDR tools identify, investigate, and respond to security incidents in cloud environments by monitoring for threats like malware, data breaches, and unauthorized access. These tools also include network monitoring and threat intelligence to detect threats in real time and limit the impact of attacks. Below are CDR tools that security teams can evaluate.
1. Diffy
Diffy is an open-source digital forensics and incident response tool developed by the Netflix Security Intelligence and Response Team. It helps teams quickly pinpoint compromised Linux instances in cloud environments.
Key features:
Diffy compares running cloud instances to a known‑good baseline to identify unexpected changes and potential compromises.
The solution assists in triage by prioritizing hosts that deviate significantly from norms, allowing responders to focus their investigation.
The platform supports AWS Linux environments out of the box and provides a plug-in architecture for extending to other platforms.
What to look out for:
Since the application primarily focuses on Linux instances, it may not provide comprehensive coverage for Windows or serverless environments.
Deploying baselines and maintaining plug-in support requires manual effort and may not scale easily across dynamic multi‑cloud architectures.
Popular with: Incident response teams handling AWS Linux‑based workloads that want rapid triage of potentially compromised hosts
2. Threat.Zone
Threat.Zone is a malware analysis platform that provides dynamic sandboxing, behavior analysis, and threat intelligence to support cloud‑centric detection and response efforts.
Key features:
Threat.Zone performs hypervisor‑level dynamic analysis of malware to uncover behavior that traditional static scanners might miss.
The resource captures network traffic, behavioral patterns, and exploit attempts in a sandbox environment to help teams map threat paths and indicators of compromise.
Teams can use the platform to integrate static, dynamic, and emulation analysis with a cloud-oriented deployment model, enabling use in hybrid or cloud settings.
What to look out for:
The platform is more focused on malware analysis than full cloud workload monitoring or automated incident response orchestration.
It may require infrastructure, configuration, and extensive time to integrate with existing security workflows and scale across multiple environments.
Popular with: Threat‑hunting and incident‑response teams that need deep malware behavioral analysis and want to incorporate sandbox findings into their cloud incident workflows
Why consider a CNAPP (and what open source gets you)
A CNAPP gives teams a unified approach to managing cybersecurity across the full cloud application lifecycle. By eliminating silos and delivering end-to-end visibility, it reduces operational overhead, surfaces real risks, and cuts costs while speeding up remediation.
Open-source CNAPP tools are a strong starting point for engineers seeking to enhance security without committing to a comprehensive enterprise security stack. These tools offer the flexibility to plug into cloud-native and third-party services, transparency into how risk is evaluated, and the freedom to customize security workflows. Many teams begin with OSS to gain traction and clarity, then consolidate with an enterprise CNAPP when scale and automation become top priorities.
A CNAPP complements your existing cloud provider tools by bringing together signals from AWS, Azure, GCP, and other open-source ecosystems. This enables organizations to build a best-in-breed strategy for IAM, data protection, vulnerability management, compliance, and threat detection without vendor lock-in.
The downsides of open source: Caveats and considerations
Open-source tools are low-cost and flexible—but frequently come with significant tradeoffs. These limitations create the following critical challenges:
Fragmentation: Most tools are developed independently and rarely work together natively. This can create gaps in visibility, overlap in coverage, and inconsistent results.
Alert fatigue: When multiple tools scan the same assets, you often get duplicate or conflicting alerts, which slow down response time and increase manual effort.
Lack of support: Open-source projects don’t offer SLAs or roadmaps. Updates, patches, and compatibility checks will fall entirely on your team. That overhead can grow quickly as your cloud environment scales.
A unified CNAPP like Wiz solves these problems for all your tools, including your cloud access security broker (CASB), CSPM, CDR, and more. Our solution bundles key capabilities, like vulnerability scanning, entitlement management, misconfiguration detection, and compliance, into one platform. That means fewer silos, less noise, and a single, trusted view of risk.
Choosing a best-fit tool: Wiz’s approach to CNAPPs
Wiz bridges the gaps left by open-source tools by unifying core CNAPP capabilities into a single, connected platform. OSS tools often operate in silos, creating blind spots, generating noisy alerts, and fragmenting workflows. Wiz eliminates that fragmentation by integrating every layer of your cloud—from code to runtime.
We combine CSPM, CWPP, CIEM, AST, and CDR to give you complete visibility and consistent policy enforcement. The Wiz Security Graph connects risks across systems and highlights only the most critical issues. It delivers clear, deduplicated alerts backed by full context, so your teams can respond quickly and confidently.
Schedule a demo today to learn how Wiz can improve your security, data integrity, and visibility in a unified platform.
FAQ
Here are a few common questions about CNAPP tools:
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