Every team running containers in production eventually asks the same question: where do the images actually live? For years the answer was “wherever is easiest,” usually Docker Hub. Rate limits changed that math. So did a wave of enterprise security reviews that flagged public registries as a supply-chain risk. In 2026, the real decision comes down to three services: Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), Azure Container Registry (ACR), and Google Artifact Registry (GAR), the registry that replaced Google Container Registry after GCR’s deprecation. Each ships as a first-party part of its cloud, each prices storage differently, and each treats security scanning as a separate line item rather than a built-in freebie. This container registry comparison walks through pricing, benchmarks, Kubernetes integration, and a migration path for teams still sitting on a deprecated registry.
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What a Container Registry Actually Does (and Why These Three Lead)
A container registry stores and serves container images, the packaged application layers that Docker, containerd, and Kubernetes pull down every time a pod starts or a CI job builds a fresh artifact. Functionally, any OCI-compliant registry can do this job. Docker Hub, GitHub Container Registry, self-hosted Harbor, and the big three cloud registries all speak the same protocol. What separates them in production is everything around the pull: identity, network path, rate limiting, and how the registry plugs into the orchestrator actually running the containers.
That is why ECR, ACR, and GAR dominate enterprise deployments despite none of them being free in any meaningful sense. Each sits inside the same cloud account as the compute that consumes the images, which means IAM-based authentication instead of a shared password, same-region network paths that skip the public internet, and no anonymous-pull throttling because the traffic never counts against a public rate limit. A 2026 container registry roundup at Distr lists a dozen registry options, but the three cloud-native ones remain the default for teams already committed to AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
Google’s move is the clearest signal of where this market has gone. Google Container Registry (the old gcr.io endpoint) is deprecated and was shut down for new projects starting in 2024, with Google steering every new workload toward Artifact Registry instead. The gcr.io hostname itself is not going away: as part of deprecating GCR, Google moved gcr.io image handling over to Artifact Registry, so pulls from gcr.io keep working and are supported indefinitely. What is deprecated is the GCR product and its old service, which no longer serves traffic. The migration path below is therefore about moving to native Artifact Registry paths and features, not about rescuing a hostname that already runs on GAR. Meanwhile AWS and Microsoft have both spent 2025 and 2026 expanding pull-through caching, letting teams mirror Docker Hub, GHCR, and Quay images into their own registry without standing up separate infrastructure.
Registry choice also tends to track cloud spend more broadly. Worldwide enterprise cloud infrastructure spending topped roughly $129 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone, growing at its fastest year-over-year clip since late 2021, and the vast majority of that spend still concentrates on the three hyperscalers behind these registries. A team’s container registry rarely gets picked in isolation, it inherits whichever cloud already won the broader infrastructure decision, which is part of why “which registry is objectively best” is the wrong question for most readers. The better question, and the one this comparison is built to answer, is which registry fits the cloud you are already committed to, and what it costs to switch if that commitment changes.
Amazon ECR at a Glance
Amazon ECR is the plainest of the three pricing models: $0.10 per GB-month for private repository storage, full stop, according to AWS’s official ECR pricing page. There is no tiered SKU to pick and no daily subscription fee sitting underneath it. New AWS customers get 500 MB of private storage free for their first 12 months, and separately, both new and existing customers get 50 GB per month of free storage on ECR Public, the side of the service built for distributing open-source images. AWS also rolled out up to $200 in Free Tier credit for new customers starting July 15, 2025, applicable across services including ECR.
Data transfer is where ECR quietly saves teams money: pulling images into EC2, Lambda, App Runner, or Fargate within the same region costs $0.00 per GB. Cross-region pulls are billed at standard AWS internet data transfer rates, which AWS’s own pricing examples put at $0.09 per GB for a transfer from us-east-1 to us-west-1. Authentication runs entirely through AWS IAM and repository policies, which is the tightest identity integration of the three registries if your workloads already live on AWS. ECR pairs most naturally with EKS through IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA) or the newer EKS Pod Identity feature, letting a pod assume a scoped IAM role instead of embedding long-lived credentials in a Kubernetes secret, as detailed in AWS’s ECR-on-EKS documentation.
In May 2026, AWS expanded ECR’s pull-through cache feature to additional upstream registries, letting teams automatically sync images from external sources into their private ECR registry and benefit from in-region pull latency plus ECR’s built-in lifecycle policies and scanning, per AWS’s official announcement. On the CI/CD side, ECR integrates natively with CodeBuild, CodePipeline, and CodeDeploy, and works fine with GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Jenkins through standard AWS CLI authentication.
Azure Container Registry at a Glance
ACR takes the opposite approach from ECR: instead of flat per-GB pricing, Microsoft sells three SKU tiers, each with its own daily rate and bundled storage. Per Azure’s official pricing page, Basic runs $0.167 per day (about $5 a month) with 10 GB of storage included, Standard runs $0.667 per day (about $20 a month) with 100 GB included, and Premium runs $1.667 per day (about $50 a month) with 500 GB included. Storage beyond the included allowance costs $0.00334 per GB per day across all three tiers, which works out to roughly $0.10 per GB-month, matching ECR and GAR once you’re past the bundled amount. Unlike ECR or GAR, ACR has no free tier: every registry, even a near-empty one, starts accruing the daily SKU charge from day one.
What that subscription buys is real, though. Geo-replication, the ability to maintain synchronized copies of a registry across multiple Azure regions under one login server, is a Premium-only feature and one of ACR’s clearest advantages over both competitors, adding $1.667 per day for each additional replicated region per Microsoft’s official SKU documentation. Premium also unlocks private link endpoints, customer-managed encryption keys, and a “connected registry” feature for edge or on-premises sync, billed at $10.334 per connected registry per month. Anonymous pull access is available on Standard and Premium but not on Basic. Authentication runs through Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) and Azure RBAC, which is the natural fit for any organization already standardized on Entra for single sign-on, and AKS integrates through Entra Workload ID and managed identities.
ACR’s artifact cache (its version of pull-through caching) supports upstreams including Docker Hub, GHCR, Quay, registry.k8s.io, Google Container Registry, and the AWS ECR Public Gallery, according to Microsoft’s artifact cache documentation. That breadth is useful for teams consolidating images from multiple upstream sources into one Azure-hosted registry. CI/CD support runs through Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, and ACR Tasks, Microsoft’s own registry-triggered build system.
Google Artifact Registry at a Glance
Google Artifact Registry launched as the successor to Google Container Registry and has since become the most format-flexible of the three services. Beyond Docker and OCI images, GAR also stores Helm charts, Maven and npm packages, Python wheels, and Go modules in the same repository model, which matters for teams that want one artifact store instead of separate systems for containers and language packages. Pricing follows the same per-GB logic as ECR: $0.000136986 per GiB-hour, which works out to roughly $0.10 per GiB-month, according to Google’s official Artifact Registry pricing page. The first 0.5 GiB per month is free, billed at the account level rather than per project, so a billing account with multiple projects shares that single free allowance.
Data transfer pricing is where GAR gets genuinely generous compared to the other two. Transfers into Google Cloud are free. Transfers within the same location are free. Transfers from a region to a multi-region (or vice versa) on the same continent are also free. Only cross-location transfers, such as us-east1 to us-west1, start incurring charges, at $0.01 per GiB for US and Canada routes per Google’s official pricing documentation. Outbound transfer to the public internet follows Google’s Premium Tier network pricing, which varies by destination.
Authentication runs through Google Cloud IAM and service accounts, and GKE workloads typically authenticate using Workload Identity Federation, which maps a Kubernetes service account to a Google Cloud service account without storing exported keys, documented at Google’s Workload Identity guide. Rather than ACR-style geo-replication, GAR uses regional and multi-regional repository locations, meaning you choose where a repository physically lives rather than replicate one repository across several places automatically. CI/CD support centers on Cloud Build and Cloud Deploy, alongside the usual GitHub Actions and GitLab CI options.
ECR vs ACR vs Artifact Registry: Full Specs Comparison
The table below lines up the three registries across the specs that actually change an architecture decision: pricing model, free tier, security scanning, replication, and Kubernetes fit.
| Spec | Amazon ECR | Azure Container Registry | Google Artifact Registry |
|---|---|---|---|
| Storage pricing | $0.10/GB-month flat | SKU-based: $0.167 to $1.667/day, plus $0.00334/GB/day overage | $0.000136986/GiB-hour (~$0.10/GiB-month) |
| Free tier | 500 MB/mo private (new accounts, 12 mo); 50 GB/mo on ECR Public | None; Basic SKU starts at $0.167/day | 0.5 GiB/month, per billing account |
| Minimum monthly floor | $0 (pay-per-GB only) | ~$5.01/month (Basic SKU daily charge) | $0 (pay-per-GiB only) |
| Same-region data transfer | Free to EC2/Lambda/Fargate/App Runner | Standard Azure bandwidth rates apply | Free within same location |
| Cross-region/location transfer | $0.09/GB (example rate, region-dependent) | Standard Azure bandwidth rates, region-dependent | $0.01/GiB (US/Canada example) |
| Vulnerability scanning | Basic scan included; enhanced scan via Amazon Inspector, billed per image | Via Microsoft Defender for Containers, billed separately | Artifact Analysis / Container Analysis, billed per image |
| Identity model | AWS IAM + repository policies | Microsoft Entra ID + Azure RBAC | Google Cloud IAM + service accounts |
| Geo-replication | Manual cross-region setup | Native, Premium SKU only | Regional/multi-regional repo locations |
| Anonymous pull access | Supported on ECR Public | Standard and Premium only, not Basic | Supported for public repos |
| Pull-through cache | Supported, expanded to more upstreams in May 2026 | Artifact cache: Docker Hub, GHCR, Quay, registry.k8s.io, GCR, ECR Public | Remote repositories (upstream proxy pattern) |
| Kubernetes integration | EKS via IRSA / EKS Pod Identity | AKS via Entra Workload ID + managed identity | GKE via Workload Identity Federation |
| OCI artifact / Helm support | Yes, via OCI workflows | Docker, OCI, Helm | Docker, OCI, Helm, plus Maven, npm, Python, Go |
| Native CI/CD | CodeBuild, CodePipeline, CodeDeploy | Azure DevOps, ACR Tasks | Cloud Build, Cloud Deploy |
| Deprecated predecessor | N/A | N/A | Google Container Registry (gcr.io), shut down for new projects in 2024 |
Pricing Breakdown: What 10GB, 100GB, and 500GB Actually Cost
Specs tables hide the part that actually shows up on a monthly invoice, so here is the same comparison run as a straight cost model at three storage sizes, using the published steady-state rates above and ignoring egress and scanning add-ons for clarity. Figures below reflect ongoing usage after any first-year free-tier allowance is exhausted; a brand-new ECR account gets 500 MB knocked off its first year of billing, and every GAR account gets a recurring 0.5 GiB knocked off every month, which shaves a few cents off the smallest tier shown here.
| Storage stored | Amazon ECR (monthly) | Azure ACR (monthly) | Google Artifact Registry (monthly) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 GB | ~$1.00 | ~$5.01 (fits inside Basic’s 10 GB included storage) | ~$1.00 |
| 100 GB | ~$10.00 | ~$20.01 (fits inside Standard’s 100 GB included storage) | ~$10.00 |
| 500 GB | ~$50.00 | ~$50.01 (fits inside Premium’s 500 GB included storage, unlocks geo-replication) | ~$50.00 |
The pattern is worth sitting with. At low storage volumes, ECR and GAR are cheaper because they charge only for what you use. At exactly 500 GB, ACR’s Premium SKU becomes cost-competitive because that tier’s flat daily rate happens to bundle 500 GB of included storage, and unlike the other two, that same $50-a-month tier also buys geo-replication, private link, and customer-managed keys. Below 500 GB, you are paying for headroom you may not use. Above it, all three revert to straightforward per-GB overage pricing. The practical takeaway: if your registry footprint is small or spiky, ECR or GAR’s pay-per-GB model wins. If you are running Premium-tier features like geo-replication anyway, ACR’s bundled storage stops being a markup and starts being close to break-even.
Benchmark Data: Latency and Independent Rankings
Head-to-head, all-three-registries latency studies are rare, most published tests compare one cloud registry against Docker Hub or GHCR rather than running all three cloud registries side by side. Still, three independent 2026 sources give a consistent directional read. A March 2026 performance test from OpenPortfolio measured ECR showing the lowest pull and push latency against GHCR and Docker Hub, attributing the gap to ECR’s tighter integration with AWS’s internal network paths. That test did not include ACR or GAR directly, so treat it as evidence about ECR versus Docker Hub rather than a three-way race.
On the ranking side, review aggregator Zipdo’s June 2026 container registry rankings scored Amazon ECR at 8.6 out of 10 overall (8.8 on value), Google Artifact Registry at 8.2 overall (8.1 on value), and Azure Container Registry at 8.2 overall (7.9 on value). A separate April 2026 ranking from Top 5 Solutions put ECR at 9.2, GAR at 8.7, and ACR at 8.4. Software directory Gitnux’s June 2026 review scored ECR at 8.8 overall, breaking down to 9.2 on features and 8.6 on both ease of use and value. None of these are controlled lab benchmarks, they are aggregated review scores, but the ordering is consistent across all three: ECR edges out GAR, which edges out ACR, in overall satisfaction even though ACR wins outright on specific enterprise features like geo-replication.
Take the absolute scores with a grain of salt since review-aggregator methodology varies, but the relative pattern lines up with what the feature comparison already shows: ECR’s advantage is operational simplicity and AWS-native latency, not a unique capability the other two lack entirely.
Security and Vulnerability Scanning Compared
None of the three registries bundle full vulnerability scanning into the base storage price, and all three route it through a separate, per-image-billed service. ECR’s basic scanning (powered by Clair) is free and runs on push, but the enhanced scanning tier requires Amazon Inspector, which bills per image scanned and adds continuous rescanning as new CVEs are published against packages already sitting in your registry. ACR takes a similar separation: image scanning is delivered through Microsoft Defender for Containers rather than an ACR-native SKU, so the cost shows up on your Defender for Cloud bill, not your registry bill, which can make it easy to miss during a pure ACR cost review.
GAR’s scanning runs through Artifact Analysis (formerly Container Analysis), commonly cited at around $0.10 per image for a one-time on-push scan or roughly $0.26 per image for continuous monitoring that rescans as new vulnerabilities are disclosed. The continuous option matters more than it sounds: a container image that passed its scan clean on push can become vulnerable months later when a new CVE lands against an OS package baked into that image, and only continuous scanning catches that after the fact.
The practical guidance is the same across all three: budget scanning as its own line item, not an assumed feature of registry storage, and if your compliance posture requires continuous rescanning rather than scan-on-push, confirm which tier of which service actually delivers that before signing off on an architecture.
Kubernetes Integration: EKS vs AKS vs GKE Image Pulls
Every managed Kubernetes service is built to pull from its sibling registry with minimal setup, but the identity plumbing underneath differs enough to matter during a migration. EKS pairs with ECR through IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA) or the newer, simpler EKS Pod Identity feature, both of which let a pod assume a scoped IAM role rather than mounting a static credential. Networking runs over the AWS VPC CNI, which allocates pod IPs directly from VPC address space, per Kubernetes’ own image-pulling documentation for the underlying mechanics that all three clouds build on.
AKS uses Entra Workload ID, mapping a Kubernetes service account to an Entra identity, combined with Azure CNI or Azure CNI Overlay for pod networking. GKE uses Workload Identity Federation, the Google Cloud equivalent, layered on VPC-native clusters with alias IP ranges. All three patterns solve the same problem (letting a pod pull images and call cloud APIs without a long-lived secret sitting in etcd) but the setup commands, Terraform modules, and IAM syntax are not portable between clouds, which is the real friction point in a multi-cloud Kubernetes strategy.
Autoscaling tooling compounds the difference: EKS commonly pairs with Karpenter for node autoscaling, GKE leans on Autopilot’s fully managed node model, and AKS relies on Cluster Autoscaler with Karpenter support still rolling out. None of that is registry-specific, but it shapes how much operational glue a team needs to write around whichever registry-plus-Kubernetes pairing it picks.
Geo-Replication and Multi-Region Availability
This is the one category where the three registries take genuinely different architectural approaches rather than just pricing the same feature differently. ACR Premium’s geo-replication maintains synchronized copies of an entire registry across multiple Azure regions under a single login server name, so a pull from West Europe and a pull from East US both resolve locally without the client needing to know which region it is hitting. It is a real high-availability feature: if one region goes down, replicated regions keep serving pulls.
ECR does not offer that single-endpoint replication model. Cross-region redundancy on ECR means manually configuring replication rules between separate regional registries, which works but requires the client or deployment pipeline to know which regional endpoint to use. GAR splits the difference: a repository can be created as multi-regional (spanning a continent-scale location like “us” or “europe”) rather than pinned to one region, which gives resilience within that multi-region boundary without the cross-boundary, single-endpoint replication that ACR Premium provides. For teams running truly global, multi-continent deployments with a hard requirement for one registry endpoint everywhere, ACR Premium remains the most purpose-built option, at a real cost: $1.667 per day for every additional replicated region on top of the base Premium SKU.
Rate Limits: How the Big Three Beat Docker Hub
The single biggest reason teams migrate off Docker Hub for production has nothing to do with features and everything to do with throttling. Docker’s own official pull-limit documentation confirms unauthenticated users are capped at 100 pulls per 6 hours per IPv4 address (or IPv6 /64 subnet), authenticated Docker Personal accounts get 200 pulls per 6 hours, and only Pro, Team, and Business subscriptions get unlimited pulls, subject to fair use. For a busy CI pipeline running dozens of builds a day from a shared IP (like a GitHub Actions runner pool or an office NAT), that 100-pull anonymous ceiling gets hit fast, and the failure mode is a build that fails with a rate-limit error, not a slow pull.
ECR, ACR, and GAR do not impose that kind of anonymous-IP throttling on their own private registries. Pulls are instead governed by each cloud’s standard API service quotas, which scale with account tier and are designed for sustained production traffic rather than capped at a flat per-IP number. That is the real, underappreciated argument for moving CI/CD off Docker Hub entirely: it is not about saving a few cents on storage, it is about removing a rate limit that was never designed for automated infrastructure in the first place. All three cloud registries’ pull-through cache features exist partly to solve this exact problem, letting teams mirror public Docker Hub images into a private registry once, then pull from that private copy indefinitely without touching Docker Hub’s public rate limit again.
Real-World Use Cases: Which Registry Fits Which Team
Specs and pricing tables only go so far. Here is how the decision plays out across common team profiles.
- An AWS-native startup shipping microservices on EKS. ECR is the default, not because it is technically superior, but because IRSA-based authentication and same-region free data transfer remove an entire category of IAM configuration that ACR or GAR would require bolting on across clouds.
- An enterprise standardized on Microsoft Entra ID for workforce SSO. ACR Premium fits naturally because Entra-based repository permissions extend the same identity model already governing employee access to everything else, and geo-replication covers a multi-region EU/US compliance footprint without a custom sync pipeline.
- A data and ML team on Google Cloud publishing both containers and Python packages. GAR’s multi-format support (Docker images alongside Python wheels, npm packages, and Maven artifacts in one repository model) avoids running a second artifact system just for language packages.
- A multi-cloud SaaS company avoiding lock-in. Some teams deliberately mirror images across all three registries using pull-through caching, treating one as primary and the others as regional or disaster-recovery fallbacks reachable without touching the primary cloud’s egress bill.
- An open-source maintainer distributing public images. ECR Public’s 50 GB free tier and lack of Docker Hub-style anonymous pull throttling make it a practical alternative to Docker Hub for projects that have outgrown the free tier there, alongside GitHub Container Registry as another no-cost public option.
- A regulated fintech needing customer-managed encryption keys. ACR Premium is again the fit, since customer-managed keys and private link endpoints are Premium-exclusive features tied directly to audit and compliance requirements that Basic and Standard cannot satisfy.
- A team still pulling from gcr.io in 2026. The pulls already run on Artifact Registry, since Google redirected gcr.io handling to GAR when it deprecated GCR, and they will keep working indefinitely, so this is about adopting native Artifact Registry rather than beating a deadline. GCR is deprecated and shut down for new projects, so the only real decision left is how quickly to complete the move to Artifact Registry, covered in the migration guide below.
Migration Guide: Moving Between Registries (and Off Deprecated GCR)
Registry migrations are mechanically simple and operationally risky, the actual image copy takes minutes, but every deployment manifest, CI pipeline, and Kubernetes secret pointing at the old registry URL has to be updated in lockstep, or pods start failing to pull images at the worst possible time. The safest pattern is a parallel-run: stand up the new registry, mirror images into it, update non-production environments first, then cut production over once pulls have been verified from the new source for at least one full deploy cycle.
For teams migrating off deprecated Google Container Registry, Google’s guidance is to redirect gcr.io traffic to Artifact Registry using the automatic redirection Google enabled for existing GCR hosts, then re-point CI/CD pipelines at the equivalent Artifact Registry hostname before that redirection window closes. The authentication commands differ slightly across all three registries, which is usually the first thing that breaks in a rushed migration:
# Authenticate Docker to each registry before pushing or pulling
# Amazon ECR
aws ecr get-login-password --region us-east-1 | \
docker login --username AWS --password-stdin .dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
# Azure Container Registry
az acr login --name
# Google Artifact Registry
gcloud auth configure-docker us-east1-docker.pkg.dev
# Re-tag and push an existing image to a new registry (generic pattern)
docker tag myapp:latest /myapp:latest
docker push /myapp:latest Beyond authentication, three things trip up most registry migrations. First, image digests change when you re-push through a different registry even if the tag name stays the same, so any deployment pinned to a digest rather than a tag needs an explicit update, not just a re-pull. Second, IAM and RBAC permissions do not transfer, a service account with pull access on the old registry has zero access on the new one until someone explicitly grants it. Third, pull-through cache and artifact cache features (on ECR and ACR respectively) can make the migration nearly invisible to consuming workloads, since you can point the new registry’s cache at the old registry as an upstream during the transition window instead of forcing a hard cutover on day one.
Pros and Cons of Each Registry
Amazon ECR
- Pro: Flat, predictable $0.10/GB-month pricing with no mandatory subscription floor
- Pro: Free same-region data transfer to AWS compute services
- Pro: Tightest IAM/EKS integration of the three, especially with Pod Identity
- Con: No native single-endpoint geo-replication, cross-region setup is manual
- Con: Enhanced scanning requires a separate Amazon Inspector subscription
Azure Container Registry
- Pro: Only registry of the three with native, single-endpoint geo-replication
- Pro: Deep Entra ID integration for organizations already standardized on it
- Pro: Premium tier bundles private link, customer-managed keys, and connected registry in one SKU
- Con: No free tier, every registry accrues a daily charge from creation
- Con: Anonymous pull access unavailable on the entry-level Basic SKU
Google Artifact Registry
- Pro: Broadest artifact format support, containers plus Maven, npm, Python, and Go in one system
- Pro: Most generous data transfer pricing, with same-continent region-to-multiregion transfers free
- Pro: Successor product with active investment, unlike deprecated GCR
- Con: No ACR-style automatic cross-region replication, only regional/multi-regional placement
- Con: Smallest free tier of the three at 0.5 GiB/month
Container Registry Cost Optimization: Cutting the Bill Further
Storage pricing on all three registries looks trivial per gigabyte, until a CI pipeline that tags every build “latest-plus-commit-hash” has quietly accumulated years of untagged, orphaned image layers nobody references anymore. The fix on every registry is the same idea implemented three different ways. ECR uses lifecycle policies, JSON rules that automatically expire images matching a pattern, such as untagged images older than 14 days or anything beyond the most recent 20 tagged builds per repository. ACR offers retention policies for untagged manifests plus scheduled purge tasks that run a script on a timer to delete anything matching a filter. GAR uses cleanup policies attached directly to a repository, which can target images by age, tag count, or a specific tag prefix pattern.
None of these run by default. A registry with no lifecycle or cleanup policy configured keeps every image forever and bills for all of it indefinitely, which is how a modest CI setup ends up with a surprisingly large monthly registry line item eighteen months in. Setting an expiration rule in the first week of a new repository, rather than after the storage bill triggers a review, is the single highest-leverage cost control available on any of the three services.
The second lever is avoiding duplicate storage across pull-through caches. A team mirroring the same public base images (an Ubuntu or Alpine base, a Postgres image, a Node runtime) into ECR, ACR, and GAR simultaneously is paying storage costs three times over for identical layers. Standardizing on one registry as the canonical mirror and letting the others reference it, or accepting the cross-cloud egress cost only when a workload actually runs in that other cloud, usually costs less than maintaining three full independent mirrors of the same public images.
Verdict: Which Container Registry Should You Choose in 2026
Cloud alignment should decide this more often than feature comparisons do. If your compute already runs on EKS, ECR’s $0.10/GB-month pricing, free same-region transfer, and IRSA integration make it the lowest-friction choice, and the independent rankings back that up: ECR led Zipdo’s, Top 5 Solutions’, and Gitnux’s 2026 scores, and posted the lowest measured latency in OpenPortfolio’s Docker Hub/GHCR comparison. If your organization runs on Azure and already manages identity through Entra ID, ACR Premium is worth its roughly $50-a-month floor the moment you need geo-replication, private link, or customer-managed keys, features neither ECR nor GAR replicate in the same form. If you are GKE-first or need one artifact store for containers and language packages alike, GAR’s format flexibility and near-free intra-continent data transfer make it the practical default, and if you are still on gcr.io, you are effectively already on GAR, and the move worth making is to native Artifact Registry paths, where the current feature set lives.
For teams without a single dominant cloud, the honest answer is that the registry choice should follow the Kubernetes service choice, not the other way around. Fighting your primary cloud’s native registry to save a few dollars a month rarely survives contact with an IAM audit or an on-call incident at 2 a.m. Pick the registry that matches where your pods already run, budget scanning as a separate line item on all three, and treat any remaining GCR usage as a migration deadline rather than a long-term option.
One more scenario worth flagging separately: teams running factory floors, retail edge devices, or other disconnected or intermittently connected sites. ACR’s connected registry feature, built for exactly that case, syncs a subset of an Azure registry down to on-premises or edge hardware so devices can pull images locally even when the link back to Azure drops. Neither ECR nor GAR ships a directly equivalent edge-sync feature today, which makes ACR the default answer for edge-heavy deployments regardless of which cloud runs the rest of the stack.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Amazon ECR, Azure Container Registry, or Google Artifact Registry cheapest?
For small to mid-size storage footprints, ECR and GAR are effectively tied at roughly $0.10 per GB-month with no mandatory base fee. ACR becomes cost-competitive mainly once your usage lines up with a full SKU tier, particularly the 500 GB included in Premium, or once you need geo-replication, which only ACR offers natively.
Can I use Amazon ECR with a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster?
Technically yes, any OCI-compliant Kubernetes cluster can pull from any OCI-compliant registry given the right credentials, but you lose the free same-cloud data transfer and native IAM integration, and you add cross-cloud egress charges and image pull latency. Pull-through caching can mitigate this, but a registry matching your primary Kubernetes provider remains simpler operationally.
What happened to Google Container Registry (GCR)?
Google Container Registry is deprecated and was shut down for new projects starting in 2024. Google Artifact Registry is its official successor, and existing GCR users are expected to migrate their images and CI/CD configuration to Artifact Registry.
Do ECR, ACR, and GAR have Docker Hub-style rate limits?
No. Docker Hub caps unauthenticated pulls at 100 per 6 hours per IP and authenticated free-tier pulls at 200 per 6 hours. None of the three cloud registries impose an equivalent flat anonymous-pull cap on their private registries. Pulls are instead governed by each cloud’s standard API service quotas.
Which registry has the best vulnerability scanning?
All three route scanning through a separate, per-image-billed service rather than bundling it into storage pricing: Amazon Inspector for ECR’s enhanced scanning, Microsoft Defender for Containers for ACR, and Artifact Analysis for GAR. None is dramatically cheaper than the others. The deciding factor is usually whether you need continuous rescanning (catching newly disclosed CVEs in images already stored) versus a one-time scan on push.
Does Azure Container Registry have a free tier?
No. Unlike ECR (500 MB/month free for new accounts, plus a 50 GB/month free ECR Public tier) and GAR (0.5 GiB/month free), ACR has no free tier. Every registry starts on at least the Basic SKU, which bills $0.167 per day regardless of how little you store.
Is geo-replication available on all three registries?
Only Azure Container Registry offers native, single-endpoint geo-replication, and only on the Premium SKU. Amazon ECR requires manually configured cross-region replication between separate regional registries. Google Artifact Registry offers regional and multi-regional repository placement, which provides resilience within a chosen geographic boundary but does not replicate a single repository across separate multi-region boundaries the way ACR Premium does.
How do I migrate images from one cloud registry to another?
Authenticate Docker against both the source and destination registries, pull each image, re-tag it with the new registry’s hostname, and push. For a full production migration, run both registries in parallel, update non-production environments and CI pipelines first, and confirm any deployments pinned to image digests (rather than tags) are updated, since digests change when an image is re-pushed through a different registry.
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