Semgrep Review: Overview, Features, Pricing & Alternatives in 2025

Tired of security tools slowing you down?

If you’re dealing with noisy alerts or slow, clunky code scanning, finding a security platform that actually speeds up development is a real struggle. That’s probably why you’re digging into whether Semgrep is a fit for your team.

From my thorough analysis, I uncovered that slow feedback loops lead to costly security misses that keep creeping into production. This isn’t just frustrating—it adds real risk to your engineering process.

What I found with Semgrep is a suite that’s built for fast, actionable security feedback without the typical false positive fatigue. Its integrated platform brings together static analysis, dependency checks, and secret scanning—all managed in a single, developer-friendly workflow.

In this review, I’ll break down how Semgrep helps you actually fix issues fast and gives your team visibility without the usual frustration.

You’ll get a comprehensive Semgrep review covering features, pricing, workflow fit, and real alternatives—straight to the points that matter for your decision.

Read on to find the features you need to compare solutions confidently and save time on your search.

Let’s dive into the analysis.

Semgrep Overview

Based out of San Francisco, Semgrep has been operating since 2017. I like that their core mission is about empowering your developers to secure code by design, not by ticket.

What I find most interesting is their relentless focus on making security a developer-native task. They serve everyone from open-source projects to large enterprises, aiming to fit scanning right into your existing CI/CD pipeline.

Their major 2022 funding round was smart, fueling a push beyond just static analysis into supply chain and secrets detection—a key update for this Semgrep review.

Unlike legacy tools like Checkmarx or complex engines like CodeQL, Semgrep prioritizes speed and an accessible developer experience. You really get the feeling it was built by engineers who hate slow, noisy tools.

They work with an impressive mix of modern software companies and established enterprises. You’ll see notable names like Snowflake, Dropbox, and Slack using it to empower their engineering teams.

I believe their strategy is spot on: unify code, dependency, and secret scanning into a single, fast, cohesive platform. This directly addresses your need to reduce tool sprawl and the constant alert fatigue that kills productivity.

Let’s dive into their feature set.

Semgrep Features

Security bottlenecks still slowing down your development?

Semgrep provides an integrated platform that tackles application security from every angle. These are the five core Semgrep solutions that simplify security for developers and teams.

1. Semgrep Code (SAST)

Slow SAST tools blocking your CI/CD?

Traditional static analysis can introduce painful delays and flood your team with irrelevant alerts. This often frustrates developers and security engineers alike.

Semgrep Code finds vulnerabilities directly in your source code using a fast, intuitive rule syntax. From my testing, the custom rule writing is incredibly powerful, letting you enforce specific internal policies. This solution runs incredibly quickly on every pull request, fitting seamlessly into your existing workflow.

This means you can get immediate, relevant feedback directly in your IDE, allowing your team to fix issues instantly, shifting security left.

2. Semgrep Supply Chain (SCA)

Worried about vulnerable open-source libraries?

Relying on open-source components without proper oversight can expose your applications to significant, hidden risks. This makes managing dependencies a constant headache.

Semgrep Supply Chain scans your manifest files, identifying third-party libraries and cross-referencing them against vulnerability databases. This solution excels with its unique reachability analysis, determining if your code actually calls vulnerable functions.

What you get is significantly reduced alert fatigue because you only focus on the vulnerabilities that genuinely impact your codebase, saving your team countless hours.

3. Semgrep Secrets

Accidentally committed sensitive data again?

Leaking API keys or passwords into public repositories can lead to costly and dangerous security breaches. This is a common, yet critical, developer oversight.

Semgrep Secrets employs a high-signal engine to scan for and validate credentials before they get committed. What I love is how it validates findings to reduce false positives, often blocking the commit instantly. This feature ensures sensitive information never reaches your Git history.

So you can prevent devastating data leaks before they happen, saving your team the immense effort of key rotation and post-breach cleanup.

4. Semgrep AppSec Platform

Struggling to manage security findings at scale?

Without a centralized view, tracking and prioritizing security vulnerabilities across numerous repositories becomes an unmanageable task. This creates a significant blind spot for security teams.

The AppSec Platform is Semgrep’s cloud-based UI, providing a single dashboard for all findings. This is where Semgrep truly shines, providing centralized visibility and control over your entire application security posture. It integrates with your existing tools like Jira and Slack.

This means your security team gains clear oversight, simplifying remediation tracking and compliance reporting without becoming a bottleneck for developers.

5. Semgrep OSS

Need powerful code scanning without the budget?

Accessing robust static analysis tools can be costly, especially for individual developers or smaller teams just starting out. This often limits adoption due to budget constraints.

Semgrep OSS is the free, open-source engine that forms the foundation of Semgrep’s entire ecosystem. I found its accessibility for individual developers to be a huge plus, allowing anyone to run powerful scans from the command line using community rules.

This solution offers an incredibly accessible entry point into code analysis, fostering trust and empowering developers to secure their code right from the start.

You’ll appreciate how these Semgrep solutions collectively form a comprehensive, developer-centric security platform designed to secure your code from inception.

Semgrep Pricing

Understanding software costs shouldn’t be a guessing game.

Semgrep pricing follows a clear, multi-tiered structure, offering options from free usage to custom enterprise solutions. This transparent approach helps you align costs with your team’s size and feature requirements, ensuring predictable budgeting.

Plan	Price & Features
Free Tier	$0 • Semgrep Code (SAST) • Scans in editor & CI/CD • Open-source rule registry • Up to 100 private rules
Team Tier	$99/contributing developer/month (billed annually) • Semgrep Supply Chain (SCA) • Semgrep Secrets • Private rule registry • Performance & risk dashboards • Slack & Jira integrations
Enterprise Tier	Custom pricing (for 50+ developers) • Self-hosted/on-premise deployment • Single Sign-On (SSO) • Advanced RBAC & audit logs • Priority support & API access

1. Value Assessment

Real value for your spend.

From my cost analysis, Semgrep’s developer-centric pricing means you only pay for active contributors, aligning costs directly with usage. This avoids paying for dormant licenses, a common budget drain. What impressed me is how the Team tier provides essential security features for a predictable monthly cost, making their pricing very approachable for growing companies to integrate robust security practices.

Budget-wise, this approach ensures your investment in application security scales efficiently, giving your finance team confidence in predictable spending.

2. Trial/Demo Options

Evaluate before committing.

Semgrep offers a 14-day free trial of their Team tier, letting you fully test the commercial platform before any financial commitment. What I found valuable is how this trial includes key features like Supply Chain and Secrets scanning, giving your team a comprehensive hands-on experience with its capabilities. This transparent approach means you can truly understand the pricing value before purchase.

This helps you thoroughly evaluate the platform’s fit and potential ROI, ensuring you make a confident, informed investment for your security needs.

3. Plan Comparison

Choosing your ideal plan.

For individuals or small teams, the Free Tier is a fantastic starting point for basic SAST. However, to leverage full SCA and Secrets capabilities, you’ll find the Team Tier is essential. Budget-wise, the Team tier balances advanced features with predictable per-developer pricing, while the Enterprise tier serves larger organizations needing extensive customization, SSO, and on-premise solutions from their security platform.

This tiered approach helps you match Semgrep pricing to your actual usage requirements, preventing overspending on unnecessary features or capacity.

My Take: Semgrep’s pricing strategy balances accessibility with robust features. Their per-developer model offers predictable scalability, making it ideal for growing engineering teams focused on integrating security early without complex budgeting.

Overall, Semgrep pricing reflects a transparent, developer-friendly approach. It helps you accurately budget for advanced application security, avoiding hidden costs as your team expands. This empowers you to secure code effectively, ensuring your budget gets maximum security value.

Semgrep Reviews

What do actual users truly experience?

Delving into Semgrep reviews, I’ve analyzed feedback from various platforms like G2 and Capterra. This section unpacks real user experiences, highlighting key insights into what customers genuinely think about this security software.

1. Overall User Satisfaction

Users express overwhelming satisfaction.

From my review analysis, Semgrep consistently achieves stellar ratings, often around 4.7 out of 5 stars across platforms like G2 and Capterra. What truly stands out in user feedback is how satisfied users are with its speed and accuracy. This high average reflects a strong positive sentiment among its user base, especially regarding its developer-first approach.

This satisfaction stems from its ability to provide rapid, high-signal security feedback, directly impacting developers’ daily workflows, which I found in multiple reviews.

2. Common Praise Points

Developer-friendly features receive consistent praise.

Review-wise, users frequently commend Semgrep’s customization capabilities, highlighting the ease of writing powerful custom rules. Customers often praise its blazing fast scan speeds, allowing integration into every commit without workflow disruption. The remarkably low false-positive rate also comes up repeatedly in user feedback.

These features mean you get accurate, timely feedback where you work, enabling proactive security fixes without unnecessary alert fatigue.

3. Frequent Complaints

Some areas need further refinement.

What I found in user feedback suggests some areas for improvement. Reviewers occasionally mention that the management UI/UX isn’t as mature as competitors’, especially for larger enterprises. Also, Semgrep Supply Chain’s feature set is noted as less comprehensive than dedicated SCA tools. Complex rule writing has a learning curve.

While these are valid points, they primarily reflect areas of ongoing development or specific advanced use cases, rather than fundamental flaws for most users.

Overall, Semgrep reviews paint a picture of a highly effective, developer-centric tool that truly delivers on its promise. The feedback provides credible insights into real-world performance, consistently highlighting strengths and emerging areas.

Best Semgrep Alternatives

Choosing the right security tool is complex.

The best Semgrep alternatives include several strong options, each better suited for different business situations and priorities. From my competitive analysis, the right choice depends on your specific development workflow and security needs.

1. Snyk

Prioritize open-source dependency and container security?

Snyk offers a more mature and comprehensive SCA and container scanning solution, positioning itself as an all-in-one developer security platform. What I found comparing options is that Snyk provides market-leading open-source security and container scanning, making it a robust alternative for dependency management.

Choose Snyk when open-source security and vulnerability management are your primary concerns, especially for larger codebases with many dependencies.

2. Sonar (SonarQube/SonarCloud)

Need a holistic view of code quality beyond just security?

Sonar excels at overall code quality, maintainability, and reliability metrics (“Code Smells”), in addition to security. Alternative-wise, your situation calls for Sonar if code quality and security combined are critical for compliance or team standards.

Consider Sonar when you need comprehensive code quality analysis integrated with security, often for “Clean as You Code” initiatives.

3. GitHub Advanced Security

Already deeply embedded in the GitHub ecosystem?

GitHub Advanced Security, leveraging its powerful CodeQL engine, is natively integrated directly into the GitHub platform. From my analysis, GitHub AS offers deep GitHub platform integration, which is a significant advantage if your organization is fully committed to that ecosystem.

Choose this alternative if you’re a GitHub Enterprise user with security engineers who can master its complex CodeQL query language.

4. Checkmarx

Operating in highly regulated industries requiring heavyweight scans?

Checkmarx is a legacy, enterprise-focused SAST leader known for its comprehensive language support and detailed audit reports. From my competitive analysis, Checkmarx provides exhaustive compliance reporting for highly regulated environments, though it’s significantly more expensive and less developer-friendly.

Your specific needs might favor Checkmarx when regulatory compliance and detailed, auditable reports are paramount.

The best Semgrep alternatives truly depend on your specific business needs and priorities, not just feature lists.

Setup & Implementation

Semgrep implementation: What does it really take?

In this Semgrep review, understanding the implementation process is crucial. Here’s a practical look at deployment, setup, and adoption, helping you set realistic expectations for your team.

1. Setup Complexity & Timeline

Expect quick initial setup.

Cloud-based Semgrep connects to your Git provider (GitHub, GitLab) with minimal clicks, automatically discovering repositories. From my implementation analysis, initial setup can be completed in under an hour for cloud deployments, but integrating into existing workflows requires some planning for your CI/CD pipelines.

You’ll want to plan for dedicated time to integrate with your CI/CD pipelines and define initial scanning policies for optimal efficiency.

2. Technical Requirements & Integration

Minimal technical hurdles for cloud.

For cloud usage, you’ll primarily need a modern CI/CD system like GitHub Actions or GitLab CI. What I found about deployment is that self-hosted versions require managing compute infrastructure, adding a layer of IT responsibility for your team to provision and maintain.

Assess your CI/CD readiness for cloud deployments, or prepare to provision and manage the necessary compute resources for self-hosted configurations.

3. Training & Change Management

Developer adoption is largely intuitive.

Basic usage for developers is quite intuitive, as feedback integrates directly into their existing tools. Implementation-wise, the main learning curve involves writing complex custom rules, requiring a deeper understanding of Semgrep’s syntax and abstract syntax trees (ASTs).

Provide resources for advanced rule-writing, like Semgrep’s documentation and playgrounds, to empower your security engineers to get the most out of it.

4. Support & Success Factors

Vendor support is generally strong.

User feedback indicates high support quality, particularly for Enterprise customers who gain dedicated Slack channels. From my analysis, active community support also aids successful implementation, providing quick answers and shared knowledge for common challenges from peer users.

Leverage both official vendor support channels and the active community to resolve issues quickly and optimize your Semgrep deployment for long-term success.

Overall, Semgrep implementation is straightforward for basic use, but scales with custom rule development. Successful deployment hinges on technical readiness and empowering developers to leverage its customization.

Who’s Semgrep For

Is Semgrep the right fit for your team?

This Semgrep review analyzes who benefits most. I’ll guide you through specific business profiles, team sizes, and use cases, helping you quickly determine if this security solution aligns with your needs.

1. Ideal User Profile

Empowering developers to write secure code.

Semgrep is ideal for modern engineering organizations embracing a “shift-left” security culture. Security-minded developers and AppSec engineers will find its focus on early, actionable feedback invaluable for enforcing unique standards. This platform empowers teams prioritizing proactive security from the start.

You’ll see strong results if your team values developer velocity, aims to reduce false positives, and seeks highly customized security checks.

2. Business Size & Scale

From individual devs to large enterprises.

Semgrep scales effectively across various business sizes, from individual open-source developers to large enterprises. It adapts to your organization’s growth through its tiered offerings, supporting both rapidly growing startups and established companies. User-wise, its flexibility means it works whether you’re a small team or a large department.

Your situation calls for Semgrep if you need a flexible solution that can grow with your team and evolving security needs.

3. Use Case Scenarios

Fast, custom, in-pipeline security.

Semgrep excels at integrating fast, accurate, and customizable security scanning into your CI/CD pipeline. It unifies SAST, SCA, and secrets detection in a developer-friendly workflow. This is ideal when generic tools miss custom frameworks or when scan speed is critical for velocity.

You’ll find this works well if your priority is embedding security early, reducing false positives, and creating custom security checks quickly.

4. Who Should Look Elsewhere

When Semgrep isn’t your perfect fit.

If your priority is a highly mature management dashboard with extensive compliance reporting, Semgrep may fall short. Its UI/UX for management needs improvement versus competitors. Also, if you require a very comprehensive, mature dedicated SCA tool, Supply Chain might be less exhaustive.

Consider SonarQube or Snyk if advanced reporting, comprehensive SCA, or a more mature UI/UX are your top priorities.

This Semgrep review shows the ideal user prioritizes developer empowerment and highly customizable, fast security in their pipeline. Your best fit hinges on embracing developer-driven security for proactive code protection.

Bottom Line

Semgrep delivers on its promises.

My comprehensive Semgrep review reveals a powerful static analysis tool that truly empowers developers, offering a robust solution for embedding security directly into the development workflow and culture.

1. Overall Strengths

Developer-first security at its finest.

Semgrep excels by enabling developers to write incredibly powerful custom rules, achieving blazing-fast scan times on every commit. From my comprehensive analysis, its low false-positive rate reduces alert fatigue significantly, integrating directly into existing workflows without disruption, a major user praise point.

These core strengths directly improve code quality and security posture without hindering developer productivity, translating into significant long-term business value and fostering trust.

2. Key Limitations

Some areas still need polish.

While powerful, Semgrep’s management dashboard and reporting features can feel less mature than some established competitors, especially for larger enterprises seeking advanced capabilities. Based on this review, the overall SCA feature set is less comprehensive than dedicated tools, and advanced rule writing has a learning curve.

These limitations are mostly manageable trade-offs for its developer-centric core strengths, yet bigger organizations may seek more robust, centralized enterprise features.

3. Final Recommendation

A strong choice for developers.

You should choose Semgrep if your priority is embedding fast, highly customizable static analysis directly into developer workflows and culture. My analysis reveals it empowers developer-centric security initiatives effectively, making it ideal for teams prioritizing speed, accuracy, and custom policy enforcement over extensive UI management.

My recommendation holds strong confidence for development teams seeking agile, effective security scanning at the source, greatly enhancing their software development lifecycle.

This Semgrep review confidently concludes it delivers exceptional value for security-conscious development teams seeking a truly integrated, developer-first solution, fostering stronger code quality.