Semgrep vs Trivy

From $40 per contributor/month (indicative)

Free and open source

The CLI plus community rules costs nothing and covers a lot; paid tiers add the platform, supply chain and secrets.

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

Open-source CLI is free and complete; hosted platform free for up to 10 contributors.

Everything, self-hosted

Widely used

Semgrep · since 2020

Category standard

Aqua Security · since 2019

• Custom rules are genuinely writable — you can encode your own security or architecture standards in an afternoon.
• Free CLI with a large community rule registry is immediately useful.
• Fast enough to run on every pull request without complaint.

• 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.

• Pattern matching without full dataflow misses some vulnerability classes.
• Community rule quality is uneven; expect to curate.
• Advanced dataflow and supply-chain features are paid 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.

Teams that want customisable static analysis and can start entirely for free.

Container and Kubernetes pipelines that need free, comprehensive scanning.