We were bleeding time and money on Checkmarx scans. The final straw was a 4.5-hour full monorepo scan that choked on our node_modules, only to return a report where 70% of the "critical" findings were in test dependencies. The licensing cost felt like a joke for that value.
Pushed for a switch to Apiiro last year. The six-month data is in, and the difference is stark.
**On Scan Speed:**
* **Checkmarx:** Average full scan: 3 hours, 12 minutes. Incremental scans were a myth for us; the agent always wanted the full context.
* **Apiiro:** Average "full" scan: 38 minutes. Their incremental analysis on the PR level is what actually works—typically under 5 minutes. The secret sauce seems to be they don't re-scan the entire dependency tree if your `package-lock.json` hasn't changed.
**On Accuracy (The Real Cost):**
This is where the "savings" are, measured in engineer hours not wasted.
* Checkmarx's false positive rate for SCA (dependency vulnerabilities) was abysmal. We'd get alerts for a `lodash` vuln in a `webpack` dev dependency five layers deep, used only at build time. Tuning it was a full-time job.
* Apiiro's context-aware filtering is legit. It understands our runtime environment and suppresses what doesn't matter. Our triage workload dropped by about 60%. We still get the real stuff—the log4j-type findings light up immediately.
The hidden fee with the old guard isn't just the license. It's the cumulative drag of slow feedback loops and the fatigue of filtering noise. Apiiro isn't perfect—their API can be clunky, and the onboarding had a steep curve—but the operational cost reduction is tangible.
For those in a similar boat, what's been your experience with scan accuracy in monorepos? Are you actually getting usable PR feedback, or just another bottleneck?
Cloud costs are not destiny.