Cybersecurity · head to head
Cosign vs Formance
Cosign
Cybersecurity
Signs and verifies container images and artifacts, with or without managing keys
- From
- Free
- Rated
- -
Formance
APIs
Open source double-entry ledger and payment orchestration for money-moving software
- From
- Free
- Rated
- -
The short version
- Each has a real cost: Cosign keyless signing inherits every weakness of the identity provider behind it. Sigstore’s own threat model states that if an identity provider is compromised, Sigstore will issue certificates to those identities, so a compromised account produces perfectly valid signatures.; Formance formance holds no money and provides no regulatory cover, so it must be paired with a payments provider or bank, and buyers occasionally mistake a ledger for a treasury system and discover the gap late.
- They diverge on capability: Cosign covers Keyless signing, Formance covers Double-entry ledger.
- Prices and features above were last checked on 31 August 2026.
Where they differ
Only the attributes on which Cosign and Formance actually diverge.
Identical on both: starting price (Free), pricing model (Open source, no licence fee), free tier (Yes), user rating (Not yet rated).
What each one covers
Drawn from each product's published feature list. An absence here means we hold no record of it - not that the product lacks it.
Only in Cosign
- Keyless signing
- Key and KMS signing
- Registry-native storage
- In-toto attestations
- Offline verification
- Trusted root and signing config
Only in Formance
- Double-entry ledger
- Numscript transaction DSL
- Multi-currency
- Payments connectivity
- Reconciliation
- Self-hosted deployment
- Cloud offering
- API and SDKs
What people use each for
The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.
Cosign
- Signing container images in a build pipeline without managing long-lived private keysnot Formance
- Attaching a signed bill of materials to a release so consumers can verify its provenancenot Formance
- Meeting a customer or regulatory requirement for signed artifactsnot Formance
- Verifying third-party images before they enter an internal registrynot Formance
Formance
- A marketplace splitting a single customer payment between seller, platform fee and tax that needs the split to be atomic and auditablenot Cosign
- A fintech whose homegrown balances table produced numbers finance could not reconcile and now needs proper double-entry before an auditnot Cosign
- A payments team that wants one normalised model across several PSPs so reconciliation is not written separately for eachnot Cosign
- A company that wants its ledger under a licence it can keep running even if the vendor disappearsnot Cosign
Where each one falls short
Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.
Cosign
- Keyless signing inherits every weakness of the identity provider behind it. Sigstore’s own threat model states that if an identity provider is compromised, Sigstore will issue certificates to those identities, so a compromised account produces perfectly valid signatures.
- A signature proves who signed, never whether they should have. The documentation is explicit that Sigstore cannot determine authorisation, so every consumer must write and maintain their own identity and issuer policy or verification means nothing.
- Nothing is enforced without an admission controller. Signing changes what you can prove, not what runs, and the official policy controller has a small maintainer base for a component sitting in a cluster admission path.
- Upgrades break pipelines. Version 3 changed defaults, version 4 is announced as removing legacy functionality and roughly half the command line flags, and two official client libraries still lacked support for the new log format as of mid 2026.
- Signatures do not expire. An artifact signed before a maintainer account was compromised and one signed after are indistinguishable unless somebody is actively monitoring the transparency log, and almost nobody is.
Formance
- Formance holds no money and provides no regulatory cover, so it must be paired with a payments provider or bank, and buyers occasionally mistake a ledger for a treasury system and discover the gap late.
- Numscript is a domain-specific language your team must learn, and while it makes complex splits expressible it also means transaction logic sits outside the languages your engineers already debug well.
- Self-hosting a ledger that must never lose or duplicate a transaction is a serious operational commitment covering backups, upgrades and Postgres tuning, which is real cost the zero licence fee hides.
- Enterprise pricing is not published, so the difference between the free path and the supported path cannot be evaluated without a sales conversation.
- The company is much smaller than the incumbent alternatives, and while the MIT licence protects the code it does not protect the roadmap, so features on the hosted side may arrive slowly or change direction.
Pricing, plan by plan
Cosign
Free- CosignFree
- Apache-2.0
- Public Sigstore infrastructure free to use
- No usage limits published
Formance
Free- Open SourceFree
- MIT licensed core ledger
- Numscript transaction DSL
- Multi-currency tracking
- Enterprise$undefined/year
- Managed or private deployment
- Payments connectivity and reconciliation
- Support with response commitments
Which should you pick?
Choose Cosign if
- You need keyless signing.
- You want to start without paying.
- You work on macOS, Linux, Windows, Docker.
- You also want key and kms signing.
Choose Formance if
- You need double-entry ledger.
- You want to start without paying.
- You work on Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Web, API.
- You also want numscript transaction dsl.
Questions people ask
- Is Cosign or Formance better?
- Neither clearly leads. Cosign starts at Free and Formance at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
- Which is cheaper, Cosign or Formance?
- Cosign starts at Free and Formance at Free.
- Does Cosign or Formance run on more platforms?
- Cosign runs on macOS, Linux, Windows, Docker. Formance runs on Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Web, API.
- Can I use Cosign for free?
- Both have a free tier, so you can try either at no cost before committing.
- What is Cosign best used for?
- Cosign is most often used for signing container images in a build pipeline without managing long-lived private keys, attaching a signed bill of materials to a release so consumers can verify its provenance, meeting a customer or regulatory requirement for signed artifacts, verifying third-party images before they enter an internal registry. Of those, signing container images in a build pipeline without managing long-lived private keys and attaching a signed bill of materials to a release so consumers can verify its provenance are not what Formance is typically brought in for.
- What can Cosign do that Formance cannot?
- Cosign covers Keyless signing, Key and KMS signing, Registry-native storage, In-toto attestations. Formance covers Double-entry ledger, Numscript transaction DSL, Multi-currency, Payments connectivity.
Answered from the vendors’ own pages
Cosign: Does Cosign tell me if an image is vulnerable?
No. It has no vulnerability knowledge whatsoever. It can carry an SBOM as a signed attestation but never reads it. Pair it with a scanner.
Formance: Is Formance really open source?
Yes. The core ledger is MIT licensed with full source access and no deployment restrictions.
Cosign: Is signing alone enough?
No. Verification is a command somebody runs. Without an admission controller enforcing it, an unsigned image still runs.
Formance: Does Formance move money?
No. It records and orchestrates movements; the actual payments happen at a PSP or bank you connect.
Cosign: What does a bare cosign verify actually prove?
Very little. Without a pinned certificate identity and OIDC issuer, it accepts a valid signature from any identity at all.
Formance: What does the enterprise version cost?
Not published. It is an annual subscription quoted per customer.
Cosign: What is the risk of keyless signing?
Your OIDC provider becomes the root of trust. Compromise of that account yields genuine, verifiable signatures, so account security is the control that matters.
Formance: Do I have to use Numscript?
Yes for anything beyond the simplest transfers. It is how multi-party transactions are expressed atomically.
Cosign: Should we expect breaking changes?
Yes. Version 4 is announced to remove roughly half the flags, and a post-quantum migration is named as a further breaking change after that.
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