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testcritic

Checkmarx One vs Semgrep

Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.

Entry price

Quote on request

Quote only

From $30 per contributor/month (Teams, per product)

Free tier

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

Enterprise annual licensing, typically by developer count or lines of code. Six figures at scale.

The CLI plus community rules costs nothing and covers a lot. Teams is priced per product per contributor — Code $30, Supply Chain $30, Secrets $15 — so scanning for all three multiplies the per-contributor figure.

Free tier

Free trial.

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

Open source

LGPL-2.1 (CLI)

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaC#JavaScriptTypeScriptPythonGoPHPRubyKotlinSwift
PythonJavaScriptTypeScriptJavaGoC#RubyPHPKotlinSwift

Platforms

WebAPIDesktopMainframe
WebAPI

Fits teams

Enterprise
StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Widely used

Checkmarx · since 2006

Widely used

Semgrep · since 2020

Strengths

  • Very deep SAST analysis with wide language coverage including legacy enterprise languages.
  • One platform and one risk view across every scan type.
  • Strong compliance and audit reporting.
  • 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.

Limitations

  • Expensive, with a long procurement and deployment cycle.
  • High false-positive volume typical of deep SAST; tuning is a project.
  • Scans are slow relative to developer-first tools.
  • 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.

Best for

Large enterprises with a security function and regulatory obligations.

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

All of these integrate with: GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins, Jira.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.