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TELEPORT INFRASTRUCTURE IDENTITY PLATFORM
Teleport vs SPIRE: SPIFFE Platform Comparison
Teleport issues identities for SPIFFE workloads and CI/CD jobs in Kubernetes and beyond for complete audit visibility and access control.
Trusted by Market Leaders
Secure Workloads Across All Engineering Infrastructure
SPIRE is an open source implementation of the SPIFFE specification used primarily in Kubernetes workloads.
Teleport outperforms SPIRE with support for node and workload attestation methods beyond SPIFFE, extending identity visibility and control to all workloads across infrastructure. Scale identity governance across multi-region cloud service and self-hosted multi-region deployments without the manual overhead SPIRE requires.
Teleport Supports:
| ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ↻ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
X.509 SVID | JWT SVID | Attestation-based | Workload | SDS API | SPIFFE | OIDC Federation | PKI Integration | Kubernetes | VM & Bare | Serverless |
Real Teleport Outcomes:
98% faster investigations
Reduce time spent correlating audit logs by 98% from hours to minutes
10x faster access
Automate provisioning and approvals to give engineers access in seconds
Same-day audit readiness
Make audits turnkey with deep audit trails across identities and zero credentials to account for
Why Enterprises Choose Teleport Over SPIRE
✔ Support for a broad range of workloads & services
Teleport supports workload attestation for Docker, Podman, Sigstore, Kubernetes, and SystemD alongside a much broader range of services
— including CircleCI, BitBucket, GitHub, GitLab, Spacelift, Azure DevOps, and Terraform Cloud.
SPIRE can offer support for cloud-native stack, but Teleport extends this support to the rest of your infrastructure.
✔ Delivered as-a-service or self-hosted
Teleport offers single-region and multi-region SaaS with 99.9% and 99.99% SLAs that are audit and compliance-ready. Self-hosted, Teleport offers both single-region and multi-region deployment with backends including Postgres, DynamoDB, CockroachDB, and more.
SPIRE is only available as a self-hosted deployment with only MySQL or PostgreSQL available as backends.
✔ Centralized control without silos
A single multi-region Teleport deployment or cloud service covers all identities across your infrastructure. Teleport also supports federation use cases via trusted clusters.
SPIRE requires setting up federation for global distributed deployments, introducing administrative overhead and data silos.
✔ Greater visibility & control
Teleport offers extensive visibility and control into bot identities with a status dashboard, inventory, and searchable audit events.
SPIRE audit and visibility is limited to audit logs that you must manually collect and forward from each federated cluster.
✔ Part of a platform, not a point solution
Teleport is ready to secure all of your infrastructure and human, machine, workload, or AI identities beyond SPIFFE.
SPIRE is an open-source project that focuses on SPIFFE only.
✔ Regular security audits
Teleport is built on an open source foundation and adheres to multiple security and compliance frameworks. We also undergo regular audits, and publish the results publicly.
SPIRE security and compliance efforts are community-driven and third-party audits are conducted irregularly.
✔ SPIFFE ready for engineers
Teleport MWI makes it easy for engineers to get SVIDs securely and conveniently by leveraging SSO to access systems for development and research purposes.
SPIRE does not solve authentication for users, requiring custom solutions.
Teleport vs. SPIRE: Side-by-Side Feature Comparison
Teleport vs. SPIRE: Side-by-Side Feature Comparison
| Feature | Teleport | SPIRE |
|---|---|---|
Cloud Service | Teleport SaaS offers single-region and multi-region SaaS with 99.9% and 99.99% SLAs, adhering to multiple compliance frameworks. | Offers only a self-hosted, single-region deployment. |
SPIFFE UX | Teleport Machine & Workload Identity supports a templating mechanism that reduces the amount of configuration resources to create and manage. Teleport also natively supports customization of the Subject for X509 SVIDs and the claims within JWT SVIDs. | Every SPIFFE ID must be manually registered or registered via the API, increasing the amount of manual configuration and overhead. |
CI/CD & Agentic Support | SPIRE agents are designed to run as a daemon, which can be difficult to use in ephemeral CI/CD environments. | |
Visibility & Control | Teleport Machine & Workload Identity offers searchable audit events, dashboard and workload dashboards with export to most common event storage systems. | Provides limited visibility and requires exporting logs from each separate federated cluster. |
Multi-Region Self-Hosted Deployment | Teleport self-hosted Machine & Workload Identity offers commercially supported multi-region deployments. | Only a self-hosted deployment with MySQL or PostgreSQL as a backend. |
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More Resources
Introduction to SPIFFE
Learn what SPIFFE IDs, trust domains, and SVIDs are and how they work.
SPIFFE Federation
Learn how to configure SPIFFE federation to and from Teleport Workload Identity.
Best Practices for Teleport Workload Identity
Discover best practices for using Teleport's Workload Identity feature in production.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I use Teleport only for SPIFFE?
Yes, you can use Teleport Machine & Workload Identity solely to issue SPIFFE identities.
Is it easy to migrate from SPIRE to Teleport?
Yes. You can replace SPIRE with Teleport by deploying Teleport MWI alongside SPIRE in a federated install and re-issue identities without disruption.
Can Teleport be used within CI/CD jobs?
Teleport Machine & Workload Identity eliminates the need for long-lived static secrets in CI/CD pipelines by issuing short-lived certificates at runtime. Teleport natively integrates with many CI/CD providers and deployment targets including GitHub, Gitlab, Bitbucket, and more.
Can Teleport connect to multiple Kubernetes clusters?
Yes, Teleport can expose many clusters at once via contexts in the generated kubeconfig.yaml; if label selectors are used, this will dynamically add context as clusters are added and removed.