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testcritic

Snyk vs Semgrep

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 $25 per contributing developer/month (indicative, Team)

Free tier

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

Free tier

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

Priced per contributing developer. Enterprise agreements add reporting and governance and get expensive.

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 tier

Free plan with a monthly test allowance, generous enough for small projects.

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

Open source

LGPL-2.1 (CLI)

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScriptTypeScriptPythonJavaC#GoRubyPHPSwiftKotlin
PythonJavaScriptTypeScriptJavaGoC#RubyPHPKotlinSwift

Platforms

WebAPIDesktop
WebAPI

Fits teams

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

Adoption

Category standard

Snyk · since 2015

Widely used

Semgrep · since 2020

Strengths

  • Reachability analysis dramatically cuts the noise from transitive dependency alerts.
  • Automated fix pull requests make remediation a merge rather than a project.
  • One vendor covers dependencies, code, containers and IaC.
  • 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.

Limitations

  • Per-developer pricing scales uncomfortably in large engineering organisations.
  • SAST is less deep than dedicated code-analysis vendors.
  • Still produces substantial alert volume on older codebases.
  • 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.

Best for

Engineering teams that want security findings arriving in the pull request with a fix attached.

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

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

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