Overview

8gears Container Registry is an enterprise Harbor distribution for storing and managing container images and OCI artifacts. It is best suited to organizations that need a choice of deployment model alongside centralized identity and supply-chain controls. Its capabilities are substantial, but the 1 GB free allowance and custom-priced paid tiers make storage needs and deployment requirements central to the decision.

Key features

Project organization, proxying, quotas, replication, and retention policies give teams practical control over how artifacts are grouped, distributed, and kept. Multi-region replication is valuable for distributed environments, while OCI artifact support and immutable tags extend the registry beyond basic image storage and help preserve published versions.

Identity options include OIDC, LDAP, SAML 2.0, group synchronization, fine-grained RBAC, and workload identity federation. Trivy scanning, content trust and signing, SSL/TLS, and encryption at rest address image and storage security. Organization-wide vulnerability views, SBOM, image policies, and audit trails exported to enterprise systems add visibility for security teams working across projects.

Terraform, Pulumi, the REST API, and Kubernetes CRDs support registry automation. Enterprise audit-log shipping can connect to Kafka, SQS, SNS, Pub/Sub, and webhooks. This breadth is useful for platform teams with established workflows, but some advanced capabilities are tied to an Enterprise agreement.

Pricing

The Individuals plan is free forever. It includes unlimited private repositories and community support, but only 1 GB of storage. That is a useful starting point for personal or small-scale use, not much room for an organization’s growing image history. Additional storage is billed per GB per month.

Dedicated is billed monthly, with price not displayed. It includes a dedicated Harbor instance, unlimited users and teams, 1000 GB of storage, a custom domain, and no egress fees, plus a 14-day free trial. The included capacity and lack of egress fees may suit teams that want a managed, dedicated registry, though the custom price needs to be established before budgeting.

Enterprise has custom pricing under an individual agreement. It adds dedicated infrastructure, multi-regional high availability, advanced authentication, a custom SLA, professional services, and white-label options. This is aimed at organizations with specific availability, identity, or service requirements rather than buyers seeking a standard self-serve tier. The free plan is permanent; the trial is 14 days.

Platforms

Deployment choices span hosted SaaS, management on a customer's cloud, and Kubernetes self-hosting, including on-premise and air-gapped environments. Managed customer-cloud options include AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, Exoscale, and STACKIT. Fully managed deployments include automated backups, upgrades, patching, and 24/7 monitoring, with a stated 99.99% availability track record. Level 3 engineering support is available Monday to Friday, 9–17 CET, by email, chat, and video conferencing.

Who it's for

Enterprises, cloud providers, multi-cloud and hybrid teams, IoT or edge businesses, and independent software vendors are the intended audience. Teams that need control over deployment location, enterprise identity, and supply-chain visibility have a strong reason to consider it. Individuals or smaller teams with modest storage needs can start free, but should account for the 1 GB ceiling; organizations seeking transparent paid pricing may prefer another option.

Pros and cons

Pros: Hosted, customer-cloud, and self-hosted Kubernetes options accommodate different infrastructure and data-location needs.
Pros: Identity, scanning, signing, SBOM, and audit capabilities address security and governance across the artifact lifecycle.
Pros: Dedicated includes 1000 GB, unlimited users and teams, and no egress fees.
Cons: The free plan's 1 GB storage limit is restrictive for sustained team use, and added storage incurs a monthly per-GB charge.
Cons: Dedicated and Enterprise prices are not displayed, so buyers must obtain custom pricing to compare paid deployments.
Cons: Level 3 engineering support operates on weekday CET business hours, not around the clock.

Alternatives

Inedo ProGet is worth considering for teams that want a free plan with unlimited private-package and Docker feeds, while accepting limited security and compliance features in its free edition.

JFrog Container Registry suits buyers looking for a free, self-managed registry that supports Docker, OCI, Helm, Helm OCI, and Generic artifacts, without Xray.

Chainguard Registry offers a free-images plan capped at five images per organization.

Docker Desktop is an alternative with a free Personal plan covering Docker Desktop, Docker Engine and Kubernetes, Docker Hub, Docker Scout, and Docker Debug; its Pro plan is 9.00 USD per month.

KakaoCloud Container Registry may suit users comparing usage-based outbound traffic charges, with 30 GiB free and rates beyond that threshold.

Quay offers an open-source community distribution under the Apache 2 license, requiring a database and reliable image storage.

Satama Container Registry is another registry option.

STACKIT Compute Engine is a compute service rather than a direct registry alternative.

Browse more options in Container Registries.

Verdict

8gears Container Registry is a strong fit for organizations that need Harbor-based artifact management with deployment flexibility and serious identity and supply-chain controls. The deployment choices and broad governance features are its chief strengths; the small free storage allowance and custom-priced paid plans are the main reasons to look elsewhere, especially if predictable costs matter more than infrastructure choice.

	8gears Container Registry	Zot Registry
Free plan	Yes	Yes
Free trial	Yes	No
Paid from	Free	Free
Platforms	api, Linux, self-hosted, Web	api, Linux, macOS, self-hosted, Web
Free plan	Yes
Image scanning	Yes	Yes
OCI artifacts	Yes	Yes
Immutable tags	Yes	Yes
Retention policies	Yes	Yes
Replication scope	multi-region
Included storage	1,000 GB

8gears Container Registry vs Zot Registry

8gears Container Registry

Zot Registry