Veracode vs CodeQL

Quote on request

From $30 per active committer/month (GitHub Code Security)

Enterprise annual subscriptions priced by application count and scan types.

Free on public repos. For private repositories GitHub split Advanced Security into two products in April 2025: Code Security at $30 and Secret Protection at $19 per active committer/month, both now available on Team plans as well as Enterprise. CodeQL sits in Code Security. Billing counts active committers, not seats, which can surprise teams with many occasional contributors.

No free tier.

Free for public repositories on GitHub.

Widely used

Veracode · since 2006

Widely used

GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2019

• Binary scanning works on third-party and supplier software where source is unavailable.
• Policy engine and attestation reports satisfy regulated procurement directly.
• Managed service model suits organisations without a security engineering team.

• Interprocedural dataflow analysis finds real vulnerabilities that regex- and pattern-based tools cannot see.
• Free on public repositories, with results in the GitHub security tab.
• Custom queries let you encode organisation-specific security rules.

• Slow feedback compared with developer-first tools — poor fit for per-commit scanning.
• Expensive per application.
• Developer experience lags Snyk and Semgrep considerably.

• Writing custom CodeQL queries is a specialist skill with a steep learning curve.
• Analysis is slow — minutes to tens of minutes, so it fits nightly better than per-commit.
• Private-repo licensing through Advanced Security is expensive at scale.

Regulated enterprises needing formal security attestation, including for supplier software.

GitHub-hosted projects wanting deep static security analysis, free if the repo is public.