Snyk is the tool you get compared to when you build anything in this space, because it is the incumbent everyone already knows. So it is worth being straight about where it is genuinely good and where it stops.
Where Snyk is good
Credit first. Snyk is a really good pattern matcher. It is fast, the IDE plugin is nice, the dependency and SCA story is strong, and developers generally like using it. If your need is known CVEs in your dependencies and the obvious signature level stuff in your own code, it does that well and it does it quickly.
Where it stops
The catch is in the name of the category. Pattern matching finds things that match a pattern. That is perfect for known signatures and textbook issues, and structurally blind to anything that is not one.
The vulns that actually end up in incident writeups usually are not patterns:
- Business logic flaws
- Auth that breaks across multiple files
- Second order injection
- Race conditions None of those match a rule, because they are not a shape in the code. They are the code not meaning what the author thought it meant. No signature describes "this is subtly wrong."
We do not have to argue this part
Instead of asking you to trust the claim, we published the test. RealVuln is an open benchmark: 676 real vulnerabilities across 26 production repositories, plus 120 false positive traps (code that looks exploitable but is not, to catch tools that just flag everything to inflate recall).
RealVuln
- 676 real vulnerabilities
- 26 production repos
- 120 false positive traps
- fully open source
The pattern based engines cluster at the bottom. You can run Snyk against the same benchmark yourself and check our numbers. We would honestly prefer you did, because the point of making it open source is that nobody has to take the vendor's word for it.
The other half nobody talks about
Detection is only half the job. Snyk finds and hands you a list. You still own the triage, you still write the fix, you still open the PR. That afternoon of work is yours.
We scan, generate the fix, test it in a sandbox, and open the PR for you to review and merge. Different job entirely.
So which one
This is not "Snyk bad." For dependency and SCA breadth and the in editor experience, Snyk genuinely wins right now, and if that is your whole need it is a fine tool. But if your problem is "we find 200 things and fix 15," that gap is the thing we built for.
Full breakdown and the benchmark: https://kolega.dev/compare/snyk/
Top comments (0)