CodeQL vs Invicti
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
From $30 per active committer/month (GitHub Code Security)
Free tierQuote on request
Quote onlyWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Free on public repos. For private repositories GitHub split Advanced Security into two products in April 2025: Code Security at $30 and Secret Protection at $19 per active committer/month, both now available on Team plans as well as Enterprise. CodeQL sits in Code Security. Billing counts active committers, not seats, which can surprise teams with many occasional contributors.
Enterprise licensing by number of target sites or applications.
Free tier
Free for public repositories on GitHub.
Demo and trial on request.
Open source
MIT (queries)
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2019
Established
Invicti Security · since 2009
Strengths
- 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.
- Proof-based scanning eliminates most false-positive triage, which is the main cost of DAST.
- Handles authenticated scanning of modern JavaScript applications well.
- Good asset discovery for organisations that do not know all their own sites.
Limitations
- 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.
- Expensive relative to free DAST alternatives.
- Scans take time and are not suited to per-commit feedback.
- Dynamic testing alone cannot find everything a code review would.
Best for
GitHub-hosted projects wanting deep static security analysis, free if the repo is public.
Organisations with many web applications and no capacity to triage scanner noise.
All of these integrate with: Jenkins.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.