Checkmarx One vs CodeQL

Quote on request

From $30 per committer/month (GitHub Advanced Security, indicative)

Enterprise annual licensing, typically by developer count or lines of code. Six figures at scale.

Free on public repos. Private repositories require GitHub Advanced Security, priced per active committer.

Free trial.

Free for public repositories on GitHub.

Widely used

Checkmarx · since 2006

Widely used

GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2019

• Very deep SAST analysis with wide language coverage including legacy enterprise languages.
• One platform and one risk view across every scan type.
• Strong compliance and audit reporting.

• Interprocedural dataflow analysis finds real vulnerabilities that regex- and pattern-based tools cannot see.
• Free on public repositories, with results in the GitHub security tab.
• Custom queries let you encode organisation-specific security rules.

• Expensive, with a long procurement and deployment cycle.
• High false-positive volume typical of deep SAST; tuning is a project.
• Scans are slow relative to developer-first tools.

• Writing custom CodeQL queries is a specialist skill with a steep learning curve.
• Analysis is slow — minutes to tens of minutes, so it fits nightly better than per-commit.
• Private-repo licensing through Advanced Security is expensive at scale.

Large enterprises with a security function and regulatory obligations.

GitHub-hosted projects wanting deep static security analysis, free if the repo is public.