Renovate vs CodeQL

Free and open source

From $30 per active committer/month (GitHub Code Security)

Free and open source, including the hosted GitHub app. Mend sells an enterprise edition with support.

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.

Everything, self-hosted

Free for public repositories on GitHub.

Category standard

Mend.io · since 2017

Widely used

GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2019

• Far more configurable than Dependabot — grouping, scheduling and automerge rules that keep PR volume sane.
• Supports dozens of package managers including Docker, Terraform, Helm and GitHub Actions.
• Free hosted app, or self-host it entirely.

• 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.

• The configuration surface is large enough to be its own learning curve.
• Without careful grouping rules it produces a lot of pull requests.
• Vulnerability context is thinner than a dedicated SCA tool.

• 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.

Teams that outgrew Dependabot's limited configuration and want update policy under control.

GitHub-hosted projects wanting deep static security analysis, free if the repo is public.