CodeQL vs Snyk

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

From $25 per contributing developer/month (indicative, Team)

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

Priced per contributing developer. Enterprise agreements add reporting and governance and get expensive.

Free for public repositories on GitHub.

Free plan with a monthly test allowance, generous enough for small projects.

Widely used

GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2019

Category standard

Snyk · since 2015

• 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.

• Reachability analysis dramatically cuts the noise from transitive dependency alerts.
• Automated fix pull requests make remediation a merge rather than a project.
• One vendor covers dependencies, code, containers and IaC.

• 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.

• Per-developer pricing scales uncomfortably in large engineering organisations.
• SAST is less deep than dedicated code-analysis vendors.
• Still produces substantial alert volume on older codebases.

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

Engineering teams that want security findings arriving in the pull request with a fix attached.