Mend.io vs Dependabot
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 onlyFree
FreeWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Quote-based enterprise pricing, typically per developer or per application.
Completely free. Advanced Security features such as code scanning are separately licensed.
Free tier
Free tier for small teams on Mend's developer products.
Free on all GitHub repositories including private ones.
Open source
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Mend.io · since 2011
Category standard
GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2017
Strengths
- 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.
- 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.
Limitations
- SAST is weaker than dedicated code-analysis vendors.
- Enterprise pricing and sales process.
- Interface is dated in places.
- 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.
Best for
Enterprises where open-source licence compliance is as important as vulnerability management.
Every GitHub repository, as the free baseline before considering a paid SCA tool.
All of these integrate with: GitHub.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.