Renovate vs Dependabot

Free and open source

Free

Free and open source, including the hosted GitHub app. Mend sells an enterprise edition with support.

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

Everything, self-hosted

Free on all GitHub repositories including private ones.

Category standard

Mend.io · since 2017

Category standard

GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2017

• Far more configurable than Dependabot — grouping, scheduling and automerge rules that keep PR volume sane.
• Supports dozens of package managers including Docker, Terraform, Helm and GitHub Actions.
• Free hosted app, or self-host it entirely.

• 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.

• The configuration surface is large enough to be its own learning curve.
• Without careful grouping rules it produces a lot of pull requests.
• Vulnerability context is thinner than a dedicated SCA tool.

• 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.

Teams that outgrew Dependabot's limited configuration and want update policy under control.

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