Renovate 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
Free and open source
Open sourceFree
FreeWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Free and open source, including the hosted GitHub app. Mend sells an enterprise edition with support.
Completely free. Advanced Security features such as code scanning are separately licensed.
Free tier
Everything, self-hosted
Free on all GitHub repositories including private ones.
Open source
AGPL-3.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
Mend.io · since 2017
Category standard
GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2017
Strengths
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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
Teams that outgrew Dependabot's limited configuration and want update policy under control.
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.