Trivy vs Renovate

Free and open source

Free and open source

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

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

Everything, self-hosted

Everything, self-hosted

Category standard

Aqua Security · since 2019

Category standard

Mend.io · 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Container and Kubernetes pipelines that need free, comprehensive scanning.

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