Vulkro vs the incumbents

You don't need a vendor in your repo.

Some need your source on their servers. Others paywall the heavyweight rules. All charge by developer head and auto-bill forever. Vulkro is the inverse: one CLI, one machine, $19 a month or $149 a year, you choose when to renew.

Compared against products like Snyk Code, Semgrep, SonarQube, Bearer, Veracode, Checkmarx, and Codacy.

Apples to apples.

12 categories, 4 tools, public benchmark numbers. "n/a" means the competitor does not publish on that category.

	Vulkro	Snyk Code	Semgrep	SonarQube
Runs on your machine	Yes	No (cloud-only)	Yes	Yes
Source code stays local	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Telemetry	None	Yes, mandatory	Optional, on by default	Optional, on by default
AI model in the scanner	None	Yes (DeepCode AI)	None	None
Account required	None	Yes	None	None
Per-developer pricing	Free, or $19 once, per machine	~$25/dev/mo+	Free / $40/dev/mo paid	Free / $150/dev/yr paid
Known bugs caught (of 55)	42	n/a	12	n/a
Accuracy score (catch vs noise)	0.68	n/a	0.32	n/a
Compliance frameworks	9	4	None native	3
Benchmark + methodology public	Yes (reproducible)	No	Partial	No
Output formats	13	4	5	4
Auto-renewal	None (you renew manually)	Yes (auto-billed)	Yes	Yes

Three categories, three trade-offs.

Each card says what the category gives up, and what they do better than us. Honest beats hyperbole.

Cloud scanners

Source-on-their-servers is the model.

Cloud scanners need your source on their servers to scan it. Pricing scales with how many developers push code: the more you ship, the more they earn. If you are comfortable putting your codebase on someone else's infrastructure, a polished cloud product is the polished option. Vulkro starts from the assumption that you are not.

Honest Where they win: IDE plugins from better-funded vendors are nicer. Vulkro has a working editor integration, but the polish is not there yet.

Open-source scanners

The heavyweight rules sit behind a paywall.

Open-source community editions are real tools, limited on purpose. The rules that catch broken access control, the harder injection bugs, cross-file data flow, and most of the OWASP API top 10 are paywalled. The free editions catch between 22% and 45% of known bugs. The paid tiers start at $40 per developer per month. Vulkro ships the equivalent of "Pro" rules for $19, with no auto-renewal.

Honest Where they win: Semgrep has the gold standard for writing your own custom rules. Vulkro detectors are compiled, so you cannot author one without us shipping it.

Code-quality + security

Security was the afterthought.

Code-quality platforms started as linters, complexity meters, and code-smell catchers. Security was bolted on later, and the security-focused rules are mostly in paid editions starting around $150 per developer per year. The free editions do not include cross-file data flow or framework-aware route analysis.

Honest Where they win: cyclomatic complexity, duplicate-code detection, formatting, code-smell heuristics. SonarQube and Codacy do those well. We do not. We do security.

Switching from one of these?

Pick your current tool. Get a one-line replacement for each common workflow.

Same workflow, no upload.

Snyk Code workflow	Vulkro equivalent
`snyk code test`	`vulkro scan .`
`Snyk PR check`	`vulkro scan . --since main --format gh-pr`
`Snyk SARIF export`	`vulkro scan . --format sarif`
`Snyk container scan`	`vulkro container <image>`

Community

Not ready to switch yet?

Follow along on Substack or r/vulkro. You will hear about new detectors, benchmark refreshes, and CVEs that broke the things you scan.

Substack

Subscribe once, get two things: the weekly CVE + release digest in your inbox, and access to the live chat where in-between things land (detector ideas, weird findings, release heads-ups).

Subscribe + join chat

Public community at r/vulkro. Bug reports, scan-result war stories, CVE chat, AppSec questions. No email required, indexed by Google so threads stay useful.

Open r/vulkro

Email

Bug reports, install help, billing questions. One human reads every message. No web form, no chatbot, no AI summariser.

Email support

Run both. See what each one finds.

Don't take the table at face value. Install Vulkro, run it on the same project your current scanner already covers, and compare what each one reports. Our public benchmark automates the comparison if you want a numeric answer.

Start 14-day trial See the benchmark