Semgrep vs Checkmarx One

From $40 per contributor/month (indicative)

Quote on request

The CLI plus community rules costs nothing and covers a lot; paid tiers add the platform, supply chain and secrets.

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

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

Free trial.

Widely used

Semgrep · since 2020

Widely used

Checkmarx · since 2006

• 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.

• 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.

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

Large enterprises with a security function and regulatory obligations.