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