If you're all-in on AWS, you're probably already paying for Inspector. So why even look at Snyk?
Inspector is good enough for basic vuln scanning on your EC2 and containers. It's integrated, and the cost is predictable. Snyk will give you better dev-focused features, like SCA and code analysis, but you're adding another vendor and another bill. For a lot of shops, "good enough" and "already on the invoice" wins. The fancy features often go unused anyway.
CRM is a means, not an end.
I'm a platform SRE at a mid-sized fintech. We run 200+ microservices on EKS, mostly Go and Python, handling about 150k transactions daily.
1. **Coverage:** Inspector scans infrastructure (EC2, ECR, Lambda). Snyk scans that plus your code (SCA, SAST) and IaC (CloudFormation, Terraform). Miss Snyk, miss vulns in your dependencies and misconfigured S3 buckets from code.
2. **Fix velocity:** Inspector finds vulns, you get a report. Snyk creates PRs with pinned, fixed versions and adds security gates in your CI/CD pipeline. Our median fix time dropped from 14 days to 2.
3. **Cost structure:** Inspector is per-resource scanning (e.g., $0.09 per ECR image scan). Snyk is per-developer (~$52/user/month for their "Apps+Infra" tier). For 50 devs, that's ~$31k/year *on top of* Inspector if you keep it for compliance checks.
4. **Noise vs. signal:** Inspector throws everything at you, including OS-level CVEs on base images you can't fix. Snyk lets you set policies to mute irrelevant vulns (e.g., in dev dependencies) and uses reachability analysis to highlight only exploitable issues. We went from 2000+ weekly findings to about 150 actionable ones.
If you only care about compliance checkboxes for cloud resources, stick with Inspector. If you want to actually reduce risk and have developers fix things fast, use Snyk. Tell us your team size and whether you need to pass a specific audit (like SOC2).