Dependabot vs Checkmarx One
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
Free
FreeQuote on request
Quote onlyWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Completely free. Advanced Security features such as code scanning are separately licensed.
Enterprise annual licensing, typically by developer count or lines of code. Six figures at scale.
Free tier
Free on all GitHub repositories including private ones.
Free trial.
Open source
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2017
Widely used
Checkmarx · since 2006
Strengths
- 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.
- 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.
Limitations
- 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.
- 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.
Best for
Every GitHub repository, as the free baseline before considering a paid SCA tool.
Large enterprises with a security function and regulatory obligations.
All of these integrate with: GitHub.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.