Renovate vs Trivy
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 and open source
Open sourceWhat 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.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Free tier
Everything, self-hosted
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
AGPL-3.0
Apache-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
Mend.io · since 2017
Category standard
Aqua Security · since 2019
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 covers container, IaC, secret and dependency scanning in one binary.
- Fast enough to run on every image build without slowing the pipeline.
- Excellent Kubernetes integration through the Trivy Operator.
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 hosted dashboard or workflow — findings go to your pipeline output.
- No reachability analysis, so alert volume is high on large images.
- Reporting for compliance requires building it yourself.
Best for
Teams that outgrew Dependabot's limited configuration and want update policy under control.
Container and Kubernetes pipelines that need free, comprehensive scanning.
All of these integrate with: Docker.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.