Mend.io vs CodeQL

Quote on request

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

Quote-based enterprise pricing, typically per developer or per application.

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

Free tier for small teams on Mend's developer products.

Free for public repositories on GitHub.

Widely used

Mend.io · since 2011

Widely used

GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2019

• Licence compliance reporting is the strongest in the category and often the reason legal approves a release.
• Reachability analysis reduces the transitive-dependency alert flood.
• Automated remediation pull requests.

• 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.

• SAST is weaker than dedicated code-analysis vendors.
• Enterprise pricing and sales process.
• Interface is dated in places.

• 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.

Enterprises where open-source licence compliance is as important as vulnerability management.

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