TruffleHog 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
Free tier available
Free tierFree and open source
Open sourceWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Free CLI; the enterprise platform adds continuous monitoring and reporting, priced on request.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Free tier
Open-source CLI is free and fully functional including verification.
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
AGPL-3.0
Apache-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Truffle Security · since 2016
Category standard
Aqua Security · since 2019
Strengths
- Live verification cuts false positives to near zero for supported providers.
- Free and easy to add as a pre-commit hook or CI step.
- Scans far beyond git — buckets, images, logs.
- 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
- No dashboard or workflow in the free CLI.
- Verification requires outbound network calls, which some environments block.
- Full-history scans on large repositories are slow.
- 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 free, high-signal secret scanning in the pipeline today.
Container and Kubernetes pipelines that need free, comprehensive scanning.
All of these integrate with: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Docker, Jenkins.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.