Introducing Chainguard Catalog Starter: Your choice of five free trusted container images from the best catalog

Today, we’re introducing Chainguard Catalog Starter: a new free offering that gives developers instant access to trusted container images from the industry’s most comprehensive catalog.

With Catalog Starter, developers can immediately begin building with Chainguard Containers. Teams of any size can choose five free container images from the Chainguard catalog and use them in their projects with the same minimal, continuously rebuilt artifacts trusted by enterprise teams.

Catalog Starter expands access to trusted open source artifacts so all builders can start with a secure foundation.

Faster start to building projects of any size

Catalog Starter is designed to support developers across a wide spectrum of use cases.

An individual developer building a small application can select a base image and a few application images and immediately begin building with trusted components.

A developer inside a large organization can begin prototyping with Chainguard Containers before expanding adoption across their team.

Startups and small engineering teams can quickly run a few initial production workloads using a small set of trusted images.

Over time, many teams expand beyond their initial five images as their workloads grow and their organizations standardize on secure-by-default container infrastructure.

Catalog Starter provides the entry point to that journey.

Trusted container images for every builder

Chainguard Catalog Starter gives developers direct access to production-grade container images from the Chainguard catalog.

The offering includes:

• Five free container images of your choice across Base, Application, and AI images from the Chainguard catalog, including all supported versions.

• Digital support resources, including documentation, courses, and the Chainguard community Slack.

Unlike many free tiers that limit developers to development-only builds, Catalog Starter provides the same trusted container images that organizations deploy in production environments.

This makes it easy for everyone to get the same level of ease and security that Fortune 100 companies get today.

A secure starting point for modern development

Open source software is the foundation of modern applications. From base operating system layers to application frameworks and AI infrastructure, nearly every workload depends on upstream components maintained by global communities.

That reliance introduces complexity and risk. Container images often accumulate vulnerabilities over time as upstream packages age, dependencies expand, and patches lag behind new disclosures.

Chainguard solves this problem by delivering hardened, continuously rebuilt open source artifacts that are secure by default. Catalog Starter extends that peace of mind to a broader developer audience.

Developers can begin projects with trusted components from day one, rather than starting with insecure defaults and hardening them later. This helps reduce downstream remediation work and raises the baseline security posture across development teams.

It also makes it easier for organizations to standardize on trusted open source components early in the lifecycle, long before software reaches production.

The world’s most comprehensive trusted container catalog

Catalog Starter draws from the full Chainguard container image catalog, which continues to expand rapidly as our factory scales.

Today, the Chainguard Factory powers a catalog that includes:

• More than 2,200 open source projects with container images available

• Nearly 400,000 architecture-specific image versions

This breadth allows teams to build across a wide range of application stacks, platforms, and runtime environments while maintaining a consistent security baseline.

The catalog continues to evolve alongside the open source ecosystem. Recent improvements include expanded Helm chart coverage, deeper SBOM transparency, new customization capabilities, and enhancements to private package repositories that make it easier for teams to integrate Chainguard artifacts into existing workflows.

As the catalog grows, Catalog Starter ensures developers can explore and adopt trusted artifacts without barriers.

Expanding access to trusted open source

The adoption of open source continues to grow across every industry and development environment. At the same time, the complexity of securing open source software continues to increase.

Improving the ecosystem's security posture requires broader access to trusted artifacts. Catalog Starter makes that possible by lowering the barrier to entry for developers who want to build with secure-by-default components. Developers can experiment, prototype, and deploy with trusted container images from the beginning of a project, allowing organizations to evaluate Chainguard Containers in real workloads before expanding adoption.

The result is a stronger foundation for modern software development and a more secure container ecosystem overall.

Chainguard Catalog Starter is available now. Get started and choose your five free trusted images today.