Dependabot vs Mend.io

Free

Quote on request

Completely free. Advanced Security features such as code scanning are separately licensed.

Quote-based enterprise pricing, typically per developer or per application.

Free on all GitHub repositories including private ones.

Free tier for small teams on Mend's developer products.

Category standard

GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2017

Widely used

Mend.io · since 2011

• 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.

• Licence compliance reporting is the strongest in the category and often the reason legal approves a release.
• Reachability analysis reduces the transitive-dependency alert flood.
• Automated remediation pull requests.

• 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.

• SAST is weaker than dedicated code-analysis vendors.
• Enterprise pricing and sales process.
• Interface is dated in places.

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

Enterprises where open-source licence compliance is as important as vulnerability management.