Snyk vs Semgrep vs GitHub Advanced Security: Real AI AppSec Cost per Developer
Short answer
Snyk and GitHub publish clear current pricing; Semgrep's Team pricing is widely reported but shows minor source variance rather than being directly confirmed from first-party material. The billing unit also differs in a way that matters: Snyk and Semgrep both charge per contributing developer. GitHub Advanced Security charges per active committer, billed on top of a separate GitHub Enterprise Cloud subscription, and was restructured in April 2025 into two separately purchasable products (Secret Protection and Code Security) rather than the single bundled product older comparisons still describe. Snyk also has a real, sharp pricing cliff between its Team and Enterprise tiers that a growing team should plan around well before hitting it.
Pricing at a glance
| Snyk | Semgrep | GitHub Advanced Security | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Yes, for evaluation and individual use | Yes — the open-source CLI (Semgrep OSS) remains free | Free for public repositories only |
| Entry paid tier | Team: $25 per contributing developer per month | Team: reported at $35–40 per contributor per month across different sources | Two separate products since April 2025: GitHub Secret Protection at $19/active committer/month, GitHub Code Security at $30/active committer/month |
| Billing unit | Contributing developer — anyone who committed code to a private repository in the last 90 days | Contributor, similarly usage-defined | Active committer — a genuinely different unit than "developer," since it counts commit activity specifically rather than repository access broadly |
| Enterprise tier | Custom-quoted, negotiated directly with Snyk sales | Custom-quoted; community reports suggest $60–80/developer/month | Both products remain per-committer at enterprise scale; requires GitHub Enterprise Cloud as the underlying base subscription, reported at $21/user/month separately |
| Required underlying platform | None — standalone product | None — standalone product | GitHub Enterprise Cloud is required as the base subscription; Advanced Security features are billed on top of it, not included in it |
| Reported pricing cliff | A real, sharp jump from Team ($3,000/year for 10 developers) to Enterprise (reported at $15,000+/year for just 11 developers) — roughly a 5x cost increase for adding a single developer past the Team tier's apparent cap | Not reported as having a comparably sharp tier cliff | Not reported as having a comparable tier cliff, since pricing is linear per committer at every scale |
What headline pricing excludes
GitHub Advanced Security's headline per-committer price is not the whole bill. Both Secret Protection and Code Security are billed on top of GitHub Enterprise Cloud, reported at $21/user/month — a company evaluating GHAS purely on its $19–30/committer/month rate is missing a substantial, separately-billed base platform cost that applies per user, not just per committer.
Snyk's Team tier appears to have a hard cap around 10 developers, based on the reported pricing cliff — a team of 10 contributing developers pays a reported $3,000/year on Team, while adding just one more developer is reported to push the cost to $15,000+/year on Enterprise. A growing team should model this cliff explicitly rather than assuming Snyk's cost scales smoothly as headcount increases.
GitHub's per-committer billing unit can work meaningfully in a buyer's favor or against it, depending on team structure. In an organization where many people have repository access but only a smaller subset commits code regularly, GitHub's committer-based model can be significantly cheaper than Snyk's or Semgrep's broader contributing-developer definition. In an organization where nearly everyone with access commits regularly, the practical difference between the two billing units shrinks.
Hidden costs
- Snyk's sales team is reported to sometimes quote Enterprise pricing based on total engineering headcount rather than actual contributing-developer count — reported to run 30–50% higher than the actual number of developers committing code. A company negotiating an Enterprise quote should confirm which headcount figure is being used as the pricing basis.
- Indirect costs are real and typically excluded from any vendor's per-seat price: integration maintenance (reported at 2–4 hours/month), triage overhead (reported at 3–5 hours/week for a 25-developer team), and developer onboarding (reported at 1–2 days per new hire) are all genuine, recurring costs that exist alongside whatever the license itself costs.
- GitHub Advanced Security remains free for public repositories — an open-source maintainer gets CodeQL scanning and Copilot Autofix at no cost, a genuinely different economic position than a private-repository enterprise buyer faces.
- Semgrep's language coverage (30+ languages) exceeds Snyk's (roughly 10–15 languages) — not a pricing fact per se, but a real factor that could mean a team needs to combine both tools for full coverage rather than treating them as fully interchangeable at any price point.
Worked scenarios
5 developers
| Estimated annual cost | |
|---|---|
| Snyk Team | 5 × $25 × 12 = $1,500/year |
| Semgrep Team | 5 × $35–40 × 12 = $2,100–2,400/year |
| GitHub Advanced Security (both products) + GitHub Enterprise Cloud base | 5 × $49 × 12 = $2,940/year (both GHAS products) + 5 × $21 × 12 = $1,260/year (base platform) = $4,200/year total |
At this scale, Snyk's per-developer rate is the cheapest of the three, and GitHub Advanced Security's requirement for a separate Enterprise Cloud subscription makes it the most expensive once the base platform cost is included.
25 developers
| Estimated annual cost | |
|---|---|
| Snyk | Already past the reported Team-tier cliff (which appears to cap around 10 developers) — this scenario falls into Enterprise territory, custom-quoted; extrapolating cautiously from the reported $15,000+/year figure at 11 developers, 25 developers likely costs somewhere in the $30,000–45,000+/year range, though this is this article's own extrapolation, not a confirmed figure |
| Semgrep Team | 25 × $35 × 12 = $10,500/year |
| GitHub Advanced Security (both products) + base | 25 × $49 × 12 = $14,700/year (both GHAS products) + 25 × $21 × 12 = $6,300/year (base platform) = $21,000/year total |
This is the scale where Snyk's pricing cliff becomes most consequential — a 25-developer team is likely paying a meaningful Enterprise premium over what a smooth linear extension of the Team rate would suggest, making Semgrep's linearly-scaling Team tier the most cost-predictable of the three at this size.
100 developers
| Estimated annual cost | |
|---|---|
| Snyk Enterprise | Custom-quoted; no confirmed or reliably extrapolated figure at this scale |
| Semgrep (Team rate extrapolated, or Enterprise) | 100 × $35 × 12 = $42,000/year if Team-tier rates still apply at this scale, though a team this size may be routed to Enterprise, reported at $60–80/developer/month, which would put the total at $72,000–96,000/year instead |
| GitHub Advanced Security (both products) + base | 100 × $49 × 12 = $58,800/year (both GHAS products) + 100 × $21 × 12 = $25,200/year (base platform) = $84,000/year total |
At this scale, GitHub's per-committer model could shift meaningfully in either direction depending on the organization's actual committer-to-total-developer ratio — a company where a smaller subset of its 100 licensed developers actually commits regularly would see a lower real GHAS cost than the straight 100-committer calculation above suggests.
Normalizing across billing units
Snyk's and Semgrep's "contributing developer" definitions are similar enough to compare directly. GitHub's "active committer" unit is genuinely narrower and can produce a materially different total depending on how concentrated commit activity is within a given organization — the same team of 100 licensed developers could have anywhere from 100 down to a much smaller number of people who actually qualify as "active committers" in a given period, and only that smaller number drives GHAS's per-committer cost (though the separate GitHub Enterprise Cloud base subscription is priced per user regardless of commit activity).
Break-even and crossover
The clearest calculable crossover in this category is Snyk's own Team-to-Enterprise cliff: at 10 contributing developers, Snyk Team costs a reported $3,000/year; at 11, Enterprise pricing is reported to start around $15,000+/year — a roughly 5x jump for a single additional developer. A team approaching this threshold should evaluate whether Semgrep's linearly-scaling Team tier, or a combination of free tools, makes more sense than crossing into Snyk Enterprise territory, unless Snyk's broader platform capability (SCA, SAST, container scanning, IaC scanning, and cloud security in one unified platform) specifically justifies the premium.
Who pays more, and when
- A small team of 5–10 developers gets the best per-developer rate from Snyk, provided it stays under the apparent Team-tier cap.
- A growing team approaching or past 10–11 developers should expect Snyk's cost to jump sharply at Enterprise, and should seriously evaluate Semgrep's more linearly-scaling pricing, or a combination of free/open-source tools, before accepting the Snyk Enterprise premium.
- An organization already fully standardized on GitHub, wanting security tooling built into the existing platform with no third-party management, may find GitHub Advanced Security worth its higher total cost (once the Enterprise Cloud base subscription is included) for the integration simplicity alone — though multiple sources describe it as "not cost-effective for large teams" on pure price grounds compared to Snyk or Semgrep.
- An organization with many repository-access users but few regular committers should model GitHub Advanced Security's actual cost using its real active-committer count, not its total user count — this billing unit can work meaningfully in the buyer's favor in this specific scenario.
- A team prioritizing lowest total cost of ownership above all else should seriously weigh combining free tools (Semgrep OSS, GitHub Dependabot, and similar) — reported to provide roughly 80% of Snyk's coverage at zero licensing cost, before committing to any paid tier from any of the three.
Limitations and uncertainty
Snyk's Team tier pricing ($25/developer/month) is confirmed from Snyk's own pricing materials; its Enterprise pricing is negotiated and not published, and the specific $15,000+/year figure at 11 developers is a third-party report rather than an official rate. Semgrep's Team-tier price shows minor variance across sources ($35 vs. $40/contributor/month); this article uses $35 as the more commonly cited figure but flags the discrepancy. GitHub Advanced Security's current pricing (two separate products at $19 and $30/committer/month, following an April 2025 restructuring) is confirmed from GitHub's own current documentation; older sources still describing a single bundled "$49/committer/month" product reflect the pre-restructuring pricing and should be treated as historical rather than current, even though the combined cost of both current products happens to total the same $49/committer/month figure. The 25- and 100-developer scenario figures for Snyk Enterprise and Semgrep Enterprise involve this article's own extrapolation from limited reported data points and should be treated as directional estimates, not confirmed quotes.
Official sources
- snyk.io/plans (Team tier pricing confirmed; Enterprise is custom-quoted)
- Semgrep's Team tier pricing is drawn from third-party reporting with minor cross-source variance; Enterprise is custom-quoted
- github.com/security/advanced-security (current pricing for GitHub Secret Protection and GitHub Code Security, confirmed as of September 2026)