Cybersecurity · head to head
Cosign vs Soketi
Cosign
Cybersecurity
Signs and verifies container images and artifacts, with or without managing keys
- From
- Free
- Rated
- -
Soketi
Developer Tools
Self-hosted, Pusher-compatible WebSockets server with a stalled maintenance record
- 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.; Soketi maintenance has effectively stalled: the maintainer has said time is severely limited, releases are infrequent, and the community has been discussing whether the project is abandoned, which means security fixes may not arrive.
- They diverge on capability: Cosign covers Keyless signing, Soketi covers Pusher protocol compatibility.
- Prices and features above were last checked on 31 August 2026.
Where they differ
Only the attributes on which Cosign and Soketi 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 Soketi
- Pusher protocol compatibility
- Presence and private channels
- Horizontal scaling
- App management backends
- Webhooks
- Prometheus metrics
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 Soketi
- Attaching a signed bill of materials to a release so consumers can verify its provenancenot Soketi
- Meeting a customer or regulatory requirement for signed artifactsnot Soketi
- Verifying third-party images before they enter an internal registrynot Soketi
Soketi
- A Laravel application that already uses Echo and wants to stop paying a hosted realtime providernot Cosign
- Realtime notifications or presence indicators where data must not leave your own infrastructure for compliance reasonsnot Cosign
- A local or CI environment that needs a Pusher-compatible server without hitting a paid accountnot Cosign
- A high-connection-count application where hosted per-connection pricing has become the largest line in the infrastructure billnot 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.
Soketi
- Maintenance has effectively stalled: the maintainer has said time is severely limited, releases are infrequent, and the community has been discussing whether the project is abandoned, which means security fixes may not arrive.
- Dependency drift on Node and uWebSockets.js will eventually force you to fork or migrate, and that cost is unbudgeted at the point you adopt it.
- There is no commercial support to buy, so a production incident at three in the morning is entirely your problem with no escalation path.
- Scaling beyond a single node needs Redis and careful configuration, and getting presence channels correct across nodes is a genuine source of subtle bugs.
- It implements the Pusher protocol rather than tracking it, so any protocol feature Pusher adds later will not appear, and the compatibility guarantee slowly decays.
Pricing, plan by plan
Cosign
Free- CosignFree
- Apache-2.0
- Public Sigstore infrastructure free to use
- No usage limits published
Soketi
Free- SoketiFree
- MIT licensed
- Unlimited connections subject to your own hardware
- No vendor billing
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 Soketi if
- You need pusher protocol compatibility.
- You want to start without paying.
- You work on Linux, macOS, Windows.
- You also want presence and private channels.
Questions people ask
- Is Cosign or Soketi better?
- Neither clearly leads. Cosign starts at Free and Soketi at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
- Which is cheaper, Cosign or Soketi?
- Cosign starts at Free and Soketi at Free.
- Does Cosign or Soketi run on more platforms?
- Cosign runs on macOS, Linux, Windows, Docker. Soketi runs on Linux, macOS, Windows.
- 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 Soketi is typically brought in for.
- What can Cosign do that Soketi cannot?
- Cosign covers Keyless signing, Key and KMS signing, Registry-native storage, In-toto attestations. Soketi covers Pusher protocol compatibility, Presence and private channels, Horizontal scaling, App management backends.
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.
Soketi: Is Soketi still maintained?
Barely. The maintainer has stated that available time is very limited and releases have been sparse; treat it as community-maintained.
Cosign: Is signing alone enough?
No. Verification is a command somebody runs. Without an admission controller enforcing it, an unsigned image still runs.
Soketi: Do I need to change my client code?
No. Pusher client SDKs and Laravel Echo work by changing the host, port and credentials.
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.
Soketi: What does it cost?
Nothing in licence fees. It is MIT licensed; you pay for the server it runs on.
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.
Soketi: What are people moving to?
Laravel Reverb for Laravel applications, and Sockudo, a Rust reimplementation, for others.
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.
Related pages
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- Soketi vs Bazel
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- Soketi vs Swagger UI
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- Soketi vs ConfigCat
- Soketi vs Cortex
- Soketi vs Dagger
- Soketi vs Deno
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