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Amazon ECR vs VMware Harbor Registry comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon ECR
Ranking in Container Registry
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Harbor Registry
Ranking in Container Registry
7th
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Container Registry category, the mindshare of Amazon ECR is 16.9%, down from 17.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Harbor Registry is 3.5%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Registry Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon ECR16.9%
VMware Harbor Registry3.5%
Other79.6%
Container Registry
 

Featured Reviews

PrashantaPaudel - PeerSpot reviewer
Wordpress Trainer at SpeedZone.fi
Has supported container workflows through fast image handling and seamless service integrations
The most valuable feature of Amazon ECR is that we can push and pull faster than other similar products. It means saving and retrieving more efficiently. This is not manual dragging and dropping, but rather programmatic taking and saving. I have used Amazon ECR with Lambda, EC2, and EFS. These are integrable services where you can call Amazon ECR from anywhere in AWS. If my product is not always dependent totally on Amazon ECR only, but if the product is dependent on Amazon ECR only, then having a low time to load, low time to save, and a faster containerizing process time would affect the software's response time. This is important.
SS
Senior Consultant at Mettler-Toledo International Inc.
Effortless setup and comprehensive image scanning enhance project efficiency with minimal manual intervention
The challenge I encountered while using the VMware Harbor Registry is that sometimes the default credentials get overwritten, so we have to restart Harbor to make it function as before. The default credential rewrite is one of the major pains with Harbor, so this has to be improved. They can expand more into the known issue section and support for the older versions. We did check the documentation as well as some of the issues mentioned in GitHub, but they weren't that useful.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"I recommend using AWS services for their availability, scalability, performance, and observability."
"In the case of Amazon ECR, there are various valuable features we can see. Currently, there are image-scanning capabilities that we use."
"The most valuable aspect of ECR is its user-friendliness."
"The Docker compatibility that ECR offers is probably the most beneficial aspect of the solution."
"It is easy to use compared to other container registries."
"The technical support services are excellent."
"The most tool's valuable feature is image scanning."
"The autoscaling functionality is the main beneficial feature of Amazon ECR. It simplifies management, but some configurations can complicate things a bit."
"It is very convenient to automate consistently deploying it to a Kubernetes environment to see how it performs."
"The most valuable features of VMware Harbor Registry are that it's lightweight and the in-built Trivy solution, which I find valuable mainly for the vulnerability scanning that it publishes."
"The most valuable features of VMware Harbor Registry are that it's lightweight and the in-built Trivy solution, which I find valuable mainly for the vulnerability scanning that it publishes."
 

Cons

"Amazon ECR's manipulation capability of tags needs to be improved."
"ECR is reliable, however, I don't consider it the best container registry available."
"If I could use less code and have more of the user interface provide predictions of the coding required in my CLI or Terraform, that would be nice."
"There were a few issues related to the roles, policies, and retrieval of data when trying to fetch images for deployment on Amazon ECS."
"Deeper integration with other security tools would enhance usability."
"There could be improvements to the interface of AWS concerning ECR."
"I would appreciate a feature in Amazon ECR that allows direct image downloads from open source into ECR, bypassing the current need to first pull the image to my server."
"It would be great if they could also provide a reference to fix the errors or vulnerabilities in the images rather than just notifying us about them."
"The default credential rewrite is one of the major pains with Harbor, so this has to be improved."
"The image scanning in VMware Harbor Registry is quite limited compared to other specialized image scanning tools."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"My company currently has Amazon ECR under the pay-as-you-go model. The tool is more affordable than Azure Container Registry, and it's worth the money."
"Amazon ECR does not have a high cost."
"The product is expensive."
"The main difference between Amazon ECR and other solutions, like Google Kubernetes Engine, is that I haven't personally used GKE. However, I know that GKE costs around $60 per month, which is quite cost-effective."
"The solution's price is reasonable compared to its competitors"
"The solution's prices are high in India as compared to the US."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise7
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon ECR?
When it comes to pricing for Amazon ECR, that is the only area AWS has to look into. Services like IoT services or SageMaker are very high, and many times customers complain that while the initial ...
What needs improvement with Amazon ECR?
For potential areas of improvement in Amazon ECR, I need to check if AWS has features similar to Azure Defender for scanning, getting vulnerabilities, and patching recommendations. Regarding additi...
What is your primary use case for Amazon ECR?
The main use case for Amazon ECR is that whatever containerized image we are building will be pushed to Amazon ECR, and then it will get deployed into a Kubernetes cluster. I appreciate that if my ...
What needs improvement with VMware Harbor Registry?
I never determined the accuracy of the scanning because I did not utilize this feature. Unfortunately, I have limited experience as I have only helped utilize from a client's platform that installe...
What is your primary use case for VMware Harbor Registry?
I am mainly deploying pilot applications in my region where many applications are more traditional and have normally used traditional frameworks. Because of this, they want to implement containeriz...
 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic Container Registry
VMware Harbor
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
360 Total Security, OVHcloud, TalkingData, Trend Micro
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon ECR vs. VMware Harbor Registry and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,438 professionals have used our research since 2012.