Snyk 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 $25 per contributing developer/month (indicative, Team)
Free tierFree and open source
Open sourceWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Priced per contributing developer. Enterprise agreements add reporting and governance and get expensive.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Free tier
Free plan with a monthly test allowance, generous enough for small projects.
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
Apache-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
Snyk · since 2015
Category standard
Aqua Security · since 2019
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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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
Engineering teams that want security findings arriving in the pull request with a fix attached.
Container and Kubernetes pipelines that need free, comprehensive scanning.
All of these integrate with: Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.