Quay.io vs Northflank Containers
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Quay.io and Northflank Containers.
Quick Verdict
3.7/5
Quay.io
0 reviews
3.9/5
Northflank Containers
0 reviews
Northflank Containers is rated higher (3.9 vs 3.7). Red Hat's hosted container image registry: unlimited free public repos, per-private-repository pricing from $15/month, automatic Clair v4 CVE scanning, robot accounts, teams, and exportable audit logs. Northflank provides container deployments with automatic Docker image builds from GitHub, background workers, cron jobs, and secret management. Kubernetes-powered with a developer-friendly interface.
Quay.io Hosted container registry from Red Hat: free public repos, CVE scanning, per-private-repo pricing | Northflank Containers Container deployments with built-in CI/CD | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 3.7 (0 reviews) | 3.9 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium |
| Starting price | Free tier available | Free tier available |
| Best for | Open-source projects needing free public image hosting, and Red Hat-centric enterprises wanting managed registries with SSO, robot accounts and audit logging | Engineering teams wanting Heroku-grade developer experience with Kubernetes-grade control: GitHub-to-deployment pipelines with per-PR previews, multi-cloud deployment including your own VPC, and GPU/AI workloads on the same platform. |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ✓ | |
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ✓ | |
| Free tier | ||
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tierteam featuresssoapi access | free tiermanaged optionteam featuresapi accesskubernetes support |
| Visit Quay.io → | Visit Northflank Containers → | |
Quay.io
Pros
- + Unlimited free public repositories with automatic CVE scanning on every push
- + Public, predictable per-repository pricing from $15/month for 5 private repos
- + Robot accounts, team permissions, SSO and exportable audit logs aimed at compliance teams
- + Decade-plus production track record (launched 2013) with a supported upgrade path to self-managed Red Hat Quay
- + Full API, image rollback, zero-downtime garbage collection and Git build triggers
Cons
- - Per-repository billing punishes micro-repo layouts; large tiers get expensive fast
- - No published uptime SLA for the hosted service
- - Clair does not cover every language ecosystem, and remediation is entirely on the customer
- - Free tier fair-use caps (100 GB storage, 1 TB egress) are enforceable quotas
- - Overlapping product lineup (Quay.io vs Red Hat Quay vs OpenShift Platform Plus) complicates buying
Northflank Containers
Pros
- + Per-second, usage-based pricing with published unit rates and no seat fees
- + Real free Sandbox: 2 services, 2 jobs, 1 database, up to $20/mo resources, always-on compute
- + BYOC runs the platform in your AWS/GCP/Azure/Oracle VPC while you keep your cloud commitments
- + Strong CI/CD: per-PR preview environments, stored builds with rollback, release pipelines
- + GPU workloads (L4/A100/H100), Jupyter, secure code execution, RWX volumes: AI-ready beyond typical PaaS
- + UI, CLI, API, and GitOps control surfaces with RBAC, secrets, and audit-oriented enterprise features
Cons
- - Young company (founded 2019, Series A): less operational track record than incumbents
- - Contractual SLA and 24/7 support are Enterprise-only
- - Storage, IOPS, throughput, egress, and gateway line items stack up on database-heavy architectures
- - Card/payment-method requirement for the free tier conflicts between the pricing page and billing docs
- - Deep platform abstraction means application-level lock-in even with BYOC
- - Documentation is thorough on features but thin on migration patterns and BYOC networking edge cases
Stay in the loop
Get weekly updates on the best new hosting and infrastructure providers, deals, and comparisons.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.