CodeQL vs Trivy

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

Free and open source

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

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

Free for public repositories on GitHub.

Everything, self-hosted

Widely used

GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2019

Category standard

Aqua Security · since 2019

• 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.

• Free and covers container, IaC, secret and dependency scanning in one binary.
• Fast enough to run on every image build without slowing the pipeline.
• Excellent Kubernetes integration through the Trivy Operator.

• 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.

• No hosted dashboard or workflow — findings go to your pipeline output.
• No reachability analysis, so alert volume is high on large images.
• Reporting for compliance requires building it yourself.

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

Container and Kubernetes pipelines that need free, comprehensive scanning.