Dependabot vs CodeQL

Free

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

Completely free. Advanced Security features such as code scanning are separately licensed.

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

Free on all GitHub repositories including private ones.

Free for public repositories on GitHub.

Category standard

GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2017

Widely used

GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2019

• Free and requires a single config file to enable.
• Version-bump pull requests mean remediation is a review, not a task.
• Grouped updates keep the PR volume manageable.

• 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.

• No reachability analysis, so it reports vulnerabilities in code you never call.
• PR noise is a genuine problem on large dependency trees without grouping configured.
• GitHub only.

• 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.

Every GitHub repository, as the free baseline before considering a paid SCA tool.

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