Semgrep vs Renovate
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 tierFree and open source
Open sourceWhat 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.
Free and open source, including the hosted GitHub app. Mend sells an enterprise edition with support.
Free tier
Open-source CLI is free and complete; hosted platform free for up to 10 contributors.
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
LGPL-2.1 (CLI)
AGPL-3.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Semgrep · since 2020
Category standard
Mend.io · since 2017
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.
- 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.
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.
- 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.
Best for
Teams that want customisable static analysis and can start entirely for free.
Teams that outgrew Dependabot's limited configuration and want update policy under control.
All of these integrate with: GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.