Dependabot vs Trivy

Free

Free and open source

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

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

Free on all GitHub repositories including private ones.

Everything, self-hosted

Category standard

GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2017

Category standard

Aqua Security · 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

Container and Kubernetes pipelines that need free, comprehensive scanning.