Dependabot vs Snyk
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
FreeFrom $25 per contributing developer/month (indicative, Team)
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Completely free. Advanced Security features such as code scanning are separately licensed.
Priced per contributing developer. Enterprise agreements add reporting and governance and get expensive.
Free tier
Free on all GitHub repositories including private ones.
Free plan with a monthly test allowance, generous enough for small projects.
Open source
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2017
Category standard
Snyk · since 2015
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.
- Reachability analysis dramatically cuts the noise from transitive dependency alerts.
- Automated fix pull requests make remediation a merge rather than a project.
- One vendor covers dependencies, code, containers and IaC.
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.
- Per-developer pricing scales uncomfortably in large engineering organisations.
- SAST is less deep than dedicated code-analysis vendors.
- Still produces substantial alert volume on older codebases.
Best for
Every GitHub repository, as the free baseline before considering a paid SCA tool.
Engineering teams that want security findings arriving in the pull request with a fix attached.
All of these integrate with: GitHub.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.