Hey everyone, I've been living in the Snyk ecosystem for years at my last gig, but I've just joined a scrappy 10-person startup where the budget is, well, startup-sized. We're looking at Snyk's pricing for our modest stack (a few Node/Python services, a monorepo) and it's a non-starter for now. I know we're not alone in this, so I wanted to compare notes on what's working for others in a similar boat.
Our core needs are pretty standard:
* **Dependency scanning** for our Python and JavaScript/TypeScript packages.
* **SAST** for the code itself, though we can be a bit more flexible here initially.
* **Good monorepo support** is critical—we don't want to pay per project if it's all in one repo.
* **CI/CD integration** (GitHub Actions) is a must.
* A **manageable false-positive rate** is huge for us. We can't spend days triaging every run.
I've been doing some digging and hands-on testing with a few alternatives. Here's my initial take:
**For Dependency Scanning:**
* **Dependabot (native in GitHub):** It's free and already there. The scanning is decent for vulnerabilities, but it's *just* dependency scanning. No license compliance to speak of, and the update PRs can get noisy. We're using it as a baseline.
* **Trivy by Aqua Security:** This has been really impressive in my tests. It's open-source, covers both containers and filesystem scanning for dependencies, and the vulnerability database is comprehensive. You can run it directly in CI. The learning curve is a bit steeper than a SaaS dashboard, but the price (free) is right.
* **Renovate:** More of a direct Snyk competitor on the dependency update side. The self-hosted version is free, and it's highly configurable. It can feel a bit complex to tune, but the auto-merging for minor patches is a lifesaver for small teams.
**For SAST:**
* **Semgrep:** This is where I'm leaning heavily. Their free tier is generous (even for teams), it's fantastic for writing custom rules, and it runs blazingly fast on our monorepo. The OSS rulesets are a great starting point. It doesn't do dependency scanning, so you'd pair it with something like Trivy.
* **SonarQube Community Edition:** The classic. It's a beast and does a ton (SAST, code quality, some secrets detection). The setup and maintenance overhead for the self-hosted instance is the real cost here. For a 10-person team, that might be too much DevOps tax unless someone really wants to own it.
My current thinking is a **Trivy + Semgrep combo** in our GitHub Actions pipeline. It feels like the most powerful, budget-conscious stack. I'd handle dependency updates via Renovate or just Dependabot's basic alerts.
But I'm sure I'm missing some nuances or other great options! Has anyone else gone through this shift? How do you find the triage experience or tuning for monorepos with these tools? Any hidden "gotchas" on the free tiers I should watch for?
—Jake
Spreadsheets > opinions