Alternatives to JFrog Artifactory

If you've been building and shipping software for any length of time, you’ve likely heard of JFrog Artifactory. As a tool for managing software packages, Artifactory’s been a top choice for years, and for good reason—it supports dozens of package types, you can host it on your own, it’s configurable and customizable, and it has many of the kinds of enterprise features teams need to get their jobs done.

But while Artifactory remains a popular choice, it's no longer the only one; the package management landscape has evolved significantly in recent years, and brought a host of new options along with it. You now have an array of tools and providers to choose from, from public clouds to source-code platforms to standalone services, all vying for your attention—so it can be tough to get your head around what’s out there and what makes each one different.

With this guide, we’ll make that a little easier by comparing some of the most common alternatives to Artifactory and showing you how they stack up across key dimensions like ecosystem coverage, hosting options, enterprise features, and more.

Here's what we'll cover:

• AWS CodeArtifact
• Google Cloud Artifact Registry
• GitHub Packages
• GitLab Packages
• Sonatype Nexus
• Cloudsmith
• Buildkite Package Registries

Whether you're thinking of moving away from Artifactory or setting up artifact management for the first time, this breakdown should help you make a choice that aligns well with the needs of your team, your delivery strategy, and your plans for future growth.

So with that, let’s get to it.

What is JFrog Artifactory?

JFrog Artifactory is an artifact repository manager—an application whose job is to centralize, store, and manage the software artifacts produced by your builds and used by your applications. Repository managers like Artifactory are like central hubs for your binaries, libraries, container images, AI/ML models, and other compiled or packaged assets.

Repository managers, package managers, and package registries are often confused (and their terms used interchangeably), but they each play a slightly different role in the delivery process. Package managers, like docker and npm, are command-line tools used for fetching, installing, and publishing software packages. Package registries, on the other hand (which are occasionally called repositories), are the web services that package managers pull from and push to— the Docker Hubs, PyPIs, and NuGets of the world. Repository managers like Artifactory sit at a level above package registries in that they provide a single home for multiple repositories, which allows teams to manage packages of different types, across different languages, in one place.

First released in 2006, Artifactory began with a focus on Java and Maven, but has since grown to support many more languages and ecosystems.

Notable strengths of JFrog Artifactory

Artifactory has several high-level strengths that have made it a common choice over the years, including:

• Broad format support. Artifactory supports more programming languages and package types than most of its competitors.
• Self-hosting options. Artifactory is one of the few repository managers you can host on your own infrastructure, making it an appealing option for teams looking for more control.
• Tooling integrations. Artifactory generally works well with IDEs, build tools, and CI/CD systems.
• Advanced features. Artifactory offers fine-grained access controls, proxying and caching through virtual repositories, metadata capture, a REST API, and more.

Potential challenges with JFrog Artifactory

Like all software tools, though, Artifactory also comes with several potential trade-offs:

• Operational complexity. Artifactory's self-managed architecture can require a significant investment in compute, storage, and load-balancing infrastructure to meet the needs of enterprise teams, which can be complex and expensive to maintain—especially in high-availability scenarios.
• Database-management overhead. Artifactory's reliance on a separately managed, production-grade database (which you must provide) adds both a single point of failure and a potential performance bottleneck that requires specialized engineering skill to provision, maintain, monitor, tune, scale, back up, and more.
• The need to keep Artifactory current. Keeping up with Artifactory's frequent major and minor releases requires ongoing effort as well, occasionally requiring maintenance windows and careful migration procedures to prevent service disruptions.

These challenges aren't insurmountable, of course—they're just factors to consider when evaluating Artifactory and how well it aligns with your team's resources, expertise, and priorities.

Alternatives to JFrog Artifactory

Now that we've seen a few of the pros and cons, let's have a look at some of the most common alternatives to see how they stack up.

AWS CodeArtifact

AWS CodeArtifact is Amazon’s built-in, fully-managed solution for artifact management. Designed to integrate seamlessly with other AWS services like IAM and CodePipeline, CodeArtifact can be a good choice for AWS-based teams looking for support for only a few package types and an easy, low-maintenance option.

AWS CodeArtifact vs. Artifactory: Deployment flexibility

CodeArtifact simplifies deployment by being fully managed; there's no need to set up or maintain your own infrastructure. However, it’s limited to a single AWS region, which can be challenging for geographically distributed teams. Self-hosted Artifactory gives you the flexibility to operate across multiple clouds or on-premises—but of course that comes with the added responsibility of having to provision and manage your Artifactory infrastructure as well.

AWS CodeArtifact vs. Artifactory: Storage options

CodeArtifact stores your packages in AWS-managed S3 buckets, which is straightforward to set up, but can be limiting in terms of customization. Self-hosted Artifactory provides greater control here as well, supporting multiple AWS-based storage options including Amazon S3, EFS, and more.

Google Cloud Artifact Registry

The successor to Google Container Registry, Google Cloud Artifact Registry supports some of the same package types as AWS CodeArtifact, but with greater support for Linux packages. Fully integrated with Google Cloud’s CI/CD tools, it also offers supply-chain security with built-in features like vulnerability scanning and binary authorization.

Artifact Registry vs. Artifactory: Access control

Google Cloud Artifact Registry’s IAM-based system offers easy access control for users, groups, and service accounts. Artifactory's hierarchical role-based access control (RBAC) model may offer more fine-grained control, but can also require more effort to set up and maintain.

Artifact Registry vs. Artifactory: Security scanning

Google Cloud Artifact Registry comes with built-in vulnerability scanning and binary authorization, a feature that adds a layer of validation to container images deployed to GKE or Google Cloud Run. Artifactory requires an additional product, JFrog Xray, and a supporting subscription for vulnerability scanning.

Sonatype Nexus

Sonatype Nexus and Artifactory are the two most established self-hosted repository managers out there, and while they share some conceptual similarities, they also have practical differences. Both support a wide range of package ecosystems (though Nexus has stronger historical ties to the Java world), and both are self-hostable and can be deployed to any cloud environment.

Nexus vs. Artifactory: Database options

Both Nexus and Artifactory ship with built-in databases for managing your repositories, packages, users, groups, and permissions. Artifactory ships with the open-source Apache Derby database, while Nexus uses the Java-based H2 database engine.

Both Sonatype and JFrog, however, advise against using these databases in production, recommending instead that you supply your own PostgreSQL server (though other SQL-based engines are supported). This means that with both products, your team is ultimately responsible for provisioning, maintaining, and tuning the database over time, which can require significant time and effort, particularly as your team and delivery velocity grow.

Nexus vs. Artifactory: Infrastructure requirements

As self-hosted tools, both Nexus and Artifactory also expect that you bring your own infrastructure. For smaller teams, this can be fairly simple, requiring little more than a virtual machine and accessible storage. But for larger, higher-velocity teams, both Nexus and Artifactory can require a substantial infrastructural footprint and active support for production workloads—especially where high availability and/or geographic distribution are involved.

Nexus vs. Artifactory: Proxying and caching

By default, Nexus supports proxying and caching of common public repositories like Maven Central and npm. Artifactory supports this as well, but requires configuring virtual repositories to achieve similar behavior. This can be more flexible, but also require additional work to set up.

Cloudsmith

A relative newcomer to the space, Cloudsmith is a fully managed, standalone SaaS product designed to support a wide range of popular package formats.

Cloudsmith vs. Artifactory: Storage flexibility

As a managed service that runs on AWS, Cloudsmith offers you the option to store your packages in the AWS region of your choice, from a list of supported regions. This is easy to set up, but can also limit flexibility, and inherently requires that your packages are stored in Cloudsmith’s AWS account. Artifactory gives you greater control over how and where your packages are stored, but at the cost of having to provision and manage all of the infrastructure yourself—services, database, storage, replication, and so on.

Cloudsmith vs. Artifactory: Rate limits

Cloudsmith frees teams from having to deal with managing infrastructure, but it can also impose limitations (e.g., a default download limit of 10,000 requests per five minutes), which could be constraining for large, high-velocity teams.

Artifactory imposes no such limits—although your overall performance in practice will of course depend on the characteristics of your self-hosted deployment: how much CPU and memory you've allocated for each service instance, how many instances you've deployed, where they're deployed, how networking and storage are configured, how much throughput your database can tolerate (and how it's tuned), and more.

GitHub Packages

GitHub Packages prioritizes integration with GitHub Actions over enterprise-grade features. It's a good potential fit for teams that use GitHub exclusively for source control and CI (less so for others, given how tightly it’s coupled to GitHub repositories) and those that require support for only a few of the most common package types.

GitHub Packages vs. Artifactory: Customization

GitHub Packages integrates well with GitHub Actions, but lacks many of the advanced features of Artifactory, which supports extensive customization and retention policies. (Though these features can also require additional configuration and upkeep.)

GitHub Packages vs. Artifactory: Integration and authentication

GitHub Packages uses GitHub tokens for authentication and authorization, which simplifies CI workflows, but may fall short for teams that need more sophisticated access controls. Artifactory ships with its own RBAC system, which supports complex, hierarchical controls, but also comes with a steeper learning curve and higher ongoing administrative overhead.

GitLab Packages

Like GitHub, GitLab's package-registries feature is designed more as a platform extension than as a standalone product. It's a reasonable choice for teams already invested in GitLab for source control and CI, and it's similarly easy to set up and use—though like GitHub, it's also tightly bound to GitLab projects, and only supports a few package types.

GitLab Packages vs. Artifactory: Storage flexibility

In self-hosted setups, GitLab Packages relies on user-provided object storage like Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, or Google Cloud Storage—and unlike Artifactory, GitLab doesn’t support file-system chaining, which lets you combine multiple file stores like S3 and NFS.

GitLab Packages vs. Artifactory: CI/CD support

As you'd expect, GitLab Packages provides deep integration with both hosted and self-hosted GitLab runners (for example, using a token-based auth much like GitHub's), but it doesn’t provide the same depth of integration for third-party CI/CD providers. Artifactory integrates similarly with all major CI/CD providers, though can require additional setup for authentication and authorization.

The Buildkite Package Registries approach

Buildkite Package Registries offers a different take on the usual self-hosted/managed dichotomy.

Rather than force you to choose between one or the other, Buildkite offers a unique, hybrid approach to package management that gives you the convenience of a fully managed service—ease of use, no operational burden, limitless scale—with the performance and security advantages of hosting your artifacts within your own cloud object storage.

Buildkite vs. Artifactory: Lightning-fast performance

With Buildkite, newly uploaded packages are available within seconds, keeping your build times down and your delivery pipelines unblocked. With optional pull-through caching of upstream public registries like npm and PyPI, and the ability to store your packages close to your build runners with Private Storage Link, you get blazing fast, consistent performance, even as your team grows.

Buildkite vs. Artifactory: Effortless scale

Scaling up and out with Artifactory, as we've seen, can require a significant and ongoing investment in supporting infrastructure and maintenance. As your team grows to enterprise scale, you may find yourself having to cope with the demands of increasingly complex HA setups, distributed deployments, storage topologies, database management, and more—all of which can require significant time, expertise, and expense.

Buildkite Package Registries handles all of these scaling challenges for you. As a component of the Buildkite platform—which powers many of the largest software teams in the world—Package Registries allows you scale your package management without limits without ever having to think about (let alone manage) the infrastructure that supports it.

Buildkite vs. Artifactory: Developer experience

Buildkite is known for delivering rich, intuitive, productivity-focused experiences that developers love. As part of the Buildkite platform, Package Registries inherits all of the same design principles and patterns, making artifact management a much more accessible (and delightful) experience to everyone on your team.

Next Steps

We admit we might be slightly biased—but we think Buildkite Package Registries strikes the perfect balance between control and flexibility to deliver the modern package-management platform teams need to ship software fast, and without limits.

Ready to see how it works?

• Start a free trial to kick the tires on Package Registries on your own
• Explore the docs to get a deeper understanding of Package Registries and how to use it
• Book a demo to discuss your current challenges and how Buildkite can help