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testcritic

Semgrep vs Checkmarx One

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

From $30 per contributor/month (Teams, per product)

Free tier

Quote on request

Quote only

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

The CLI plus community rules costs nothing and covers a lot. Teams is priced per product per contributor — Code $30, Supply Chain $30, Secrets $15 — so scanning for all three multiplies the per-contributor figure.

Enterprise annual licensing, typically by developer count or lines of code. Six figures at scale.

Free tier

Open-source CLI is free and complete; hosted platform free for up to 10 contributors.

Free trial.

Open source

LGPL-2.1 (CLI)

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

PythonJavaScriptTypeScriptJavaGoC#RubyPHPKotlinSwift
JavaC#JavaScriptTypeScriptPythonGoPHPRubyKotlinSwift

Platforms

WebAPI
WebAPIDesktopMainframe

Fits teams

StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
Enterprise

Adoption

Widely used

Semgrep · since 2020

Widely used

Checkmarx · since 2006

Strengths

  • Custom rules are genuinely writable — you can encode your own security or architecture standards in an afternoon.
  • Free CLI with a large community rule registry is immediately useful.
  • Fast enough to run on every pull request without complaint.
  • Very deep SAST analysis with wide language coverage including legacy enterprise languages.
  • One platform and one risk view across every scan type.
  • Strong compliance and audit reporting.

Limitations

  • Pattern matching without full dataflow misses some vulnerability classes.
  • Community rule quality is uneven; expect to curate.
  • Advanced dataflow and supply-chain features are paid only.
  • Expensive, with a long procurement and deployment cycle.
  • High false-positive volume typical of deep SAST; tuning is a project.
  • Scans are slow relative to developer-first tools.

Best for

Teams that want customisable static analysis and can start entirely for free.

Large enterprises with a security function and regulatory obligations.

All of these integrate with: GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins, Jira.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.