Vulkro vs the incumbents
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 CE, SonarQube CE, Bearer, Veracode, Checkmarx, and Codacy.
12 trades, 4 tools, public benchmark numbers. "n/a" means the competitor doesn't publish on this metric.
| Vulkro | Snyk Code | Semgrep CE | SonarQube CE | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 |
| LLM in the scanner | None | Yes (DeepCode AI) | None | None |
| Account required | None | Yes | None | None |
| Per-developer pricing | $19 once, per machine | ~$25/dev/mo+ | Free CE / $40/dev/mo Pro | Free CE / $150/dev/yr DE+ |
| Catalogued bugs caught (of 55) | 42 | n/a | 12 | n/a |
| F1 at production setting | 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 (manual buy) | Yes (auto-bill SaaS) | Yes | Yes |
Each card states what the category gives up - and what they do better than us. Honest beats hyperbole.
Cloud SAST tools require your source on their servers to scan. Pricing scales with how many developers push code: the more you ship, the more they earn. If you can live with your codebase on someone else's infrastructure, a polished cloud product is the most polished option. Vulkro starts from the assumption that you can't.
Honest Where they win: IDE plugins from better-funded vendors are nicer. Vulkro has an LSP that works; the polish doesn't match.
Open-source community editions are real tools, limited on purpose. The rules that catch IDOR, broken access control, taint flow across files, and most of the OWASP API Top 10 are paywalled. CE recall sits at 22-45%. Paid tiers ask $40 per developer per month. Vulkro ships the equivalent of "Pro" rules for $19, no auto-renew.
Honest Where they win: Semgrep's pattern DSL is the gold standard for custom rules. Vulkro detectors are compiled Rust modules; you can't author one without rebuilding.
Code-quality platforms have linting, complexity, and code-smell rules at their roots. Security was added later, and the security-focused ruleset is mostly in paid editions starting around $150 per developer per year. CE editions don't include cross-file taint or framework-aware route analysis.
Honest Where they win: cyclomatic complexity, duplication detection, formatting, code-smell heuristics. SonarQube and Codacy do those well. We don't. We do security.
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
Follow along on Substack or r/vulkro. You will hear about new detectors, benchmark refreshes, and CVEs that broke the things you scan.
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).
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.
Bug reports, install help, billing questions. One human reads every message. No web form, no chatbot, no AI summariser.
Don't take the table at face value. Install Vulkro, run it on the same repo your current scanner already covers, and diff the findings. The public benchmark harness automates this if you want a numeric answer.