Snyk vs CodeQL

From $25 per contributing developer/month (indicative, Team)

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

Priced per contributing developer. Enterprise agreements add reporting and governance and get expensive.

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

Free plan with a monthly test allowance, generous enough for small projects.

Free for public repositories on GitHub.

Category standard

Snyk · since 2015

Widely used

GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2019

• Reachability analysis dramatically cuts the noise from transitive dependency alerts.
• Automated fix pull requests make remediation a merge rather than a project.
• One vendor covers dependencies, code, containers and IaC.

• 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.

• Per-developer pricing scales uncomfortably in large engineering organisations.
• SAST is less deep than dedicated code-analysis vendors.
• Still produces substantial alert volume on older codebases.

• 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.

Engineering teams that want security findings arriving in the pull request with a fix attached.

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