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testcritic

Semgrep vs Mend.io

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.

Quote-based enterprise pricing, typically per developer or per application.

Free tier

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

Free tier for small teams on Mend's developer products.

Open source

LGPL-2.1 (CLI)

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

PythonJavaScriptTypeScriptJavaGoC#RubyPHPKotlinSwift
JavaJavaScriptTypeScriptPythonC#GoRubyPHPKotlinSwift

Platforms

WebAPI
WebAPI

Fits teams

StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
Scale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Widely used

Semgrep · since 2020

Widely used

Mend.io · since 2011

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.
  • Licence compliance reporting is the strongest in the category and often the reason legal approves a release.
  • Reachability analysis reduces the transitive-dependency alert flood.
  • Automated remediation pull requests.

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.
  • SAST is weaker than dedicated code-analysis vendors.
  • Enterprise pricing and sales process.
  • Interface is dated in places.

Best for

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

Enterprises where open-source licence compliance is as important as vulnerability management.

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.