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testcritic

Semgrep 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

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

Free tier

Free and open source

Open source

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.

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

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)

Apache-2.0

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

PythonJavaScriptTypeScriptJavaGoC#RubyPHPKotlinSwift
GoCodeless

Platforms

WebAPI
WebAPI

Fits teams

StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Widely used

Semgrep · since 2020

Category standard

Aqua Security · since 2019

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.
  • 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

  • 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.
  • 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 want customisable static analysis and can start entirely for free.

Container and Kubernetes pipelines that need free, comprehensive scanning.

All of these integrate with: Jenkins.

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