Alright folks, time for a classic SAST showdown. We recently went through a deep evaluation for my team, and I wanted to share the real-world numbers and trade-offs we found. We're a ~100 engineer shop running a mix of microservices on AWS EKS and some serverless stuff, so cloud costs are always top of mind (you know me 😉).
We shortlisted Semgrep, Checkmarx, and CodeQL. Our core needs were: good security coverage, fast feedback in CI, manageable false positives, and of course, **total cost of ownership**.
Here’s the breakdown from our 3-month pilot:
* **Semgrep**: Blazing fast in CI (<5 mins for our main repo). The custom rule writing in YAML was a game-changer for catching our internal patterns. The OSS engine is fantastic for a start. For our scale, the Pro tier was quoted at ~$25k/year. Biggest win was developer adoption—easy to run locally.
* **Checkmarx**: The coverage was deep, especially for our legacy Java services. However, scan times in CI were often 20-30 minutes, which devs hated. The pricing model was opaque, but enterprise quotes started north of $70k. The false positive rate required a dedicated security person to triage.
* **CodeQL**: Incredibly powerful for variant analysis and has a great free tier for public repos. But scaling it privately? The learning curve is steep, and managing the self-hosted runners for performance added significant infra overhead (≈$1.2k/month in extra EC2 costs). Engineer hours to write custom queries were high.
**So, who won?** For us, it was Semgrep. The combination of speed, cost, and developer-friendly customization tipped the scales. We’re projecting a **~40% savings** compared to the Checkmarx quote, and the engineers actually use it. We miss some of the deeper interfile analysis of CodeQL, but for 80% of our findings, Semgrep does the job faster and cheaper.
Would love to hear from other shops our size. Did you prioritize something different? Anyone get Checkmarx costs down significantly? The TCO on these tools can be a hidden budget killer!
— Jackson
Right-size everything