A practical look at Red Hat Quay and Quay.io: container registry features, security scanning, pricing, and how it compares to other registries.
Quay is a container image registry with roots going back to 2013, when it launched as one of the first hosted enterprise container registries, offering features like image rollback and zero-downtime garbage collection before container registries were common. CoreOS acquired Quay in 2014 and built an on-premise Quay Enterprise offering around it, and when Red Hat acquired CoreOS in January 2018, Quay became a core part of Red Hat's cloud and container portfolio under the name Red Hat Quay.
Red Hat later open-sourced the underlying technology as Project Quay, and the product now exists in two forms: the publicly hosted Quay.io service, which is free for public repositories, and self-managed Red Hat Quay, a subscription product that organizations deploy in their own environments, frequently alongside Red Hat OpenShift and other Kubernetes distributions for enterprise-grade security and control over container image supply chains.
Quay's security-first design includes built-in vulnerability scanning of container images, fine-grained access control through robot accounts intended for automated systems, and detailed audit logging that supports rolling back changes when something goes wrong. Automated build triggers connect directly to GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket so new image versions can be built and published automatically whenever code is pushed.
For organizations operating at scale, Red Hat Quay supports high availability and geo-replication, allowing a single logical registry to run across multiple data centers or cloud regions behind one URL, which is particularly valuable for globally distributed Kubernetes and OpenShift deployments. Quay supports both Docker and OCI image formats and integrates tightly with the broader Red Hat and Kubernetes ecosystem.
Public repositories on Quay.io are free to host and use, which is why many open-source projects rely on it for distributing container images at no cost. Private repositories on Quay.io are sold in tiered plans based on the number of private repositories rather than data volume, though Red Hat does not publish a fixed price list for these tiers.
Self-managed Red Hat Quay for enterprise deployments is sold as a Red Hat subscription priced per deployment, where a deployment refers to a single registry installation using a shared data backend, with no limit on the number of pods that can be run within that deployment. Subscriptions are available at Standard or Premium support levels, and exact pricing requires contacting Red Hat sales for a quote based on deployment scope and support needs.
Quay.io is Red Hat's publicly hosted registry service, free for public repositories with paid tiers for private ones, while Red Hat Quay is the self-managed, subscription-based version organizations deploy in their own infrastructure.
Public repositories on Quay.io are free. Private repositories on Quay.io require a paid plan, and self-managed Red Hat Quay requires a Red Hat subscription.
Quay is owned by Red Hat, which itself is a subsidiary of IBM. Quay was originally an independent product acquired by CoreOS in 2014, then became part of Red Hat when Red Hat acquired CoreOS in 2018.
Yes, Quay integrates closely with Kubernetes and is commonly deployed alongside Red Hat OpenShift as the container image registry for Kubernetes-based platforms.
Project Quay is the open-source upstream project that Red Hat released, forming the technical foundation for both the hosted Quay.io service and the commercial Red Hat Quay product.
Yes, Quay includes built-in container image vulnerability scanning as a core security feature.
Yes, Red Hat Quay can be self-hosted in your own infrastructure as a subscription product, separate from the publicly hosted Quay.io service.