Trivy vs Dependabot

Free and open source

Free

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

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

Aqua Security · since 2019

Category standard

GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2017

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Container and Kubernetes pipelines that need free, comprehensive scanning.

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