buddy vs snyk

Not the same size of thing

Snyk is a security platform: SCA, SAST, container and IaC scanning, its own vulnerability database, and reporting built for people who answer to auditors. Buddy is a reviewer and a dependency bot that happens to enforce security policy well. Be clear about which problem you have.

Security & compliance Workflow security All comparisons

the overlap, as a gate

export default {
  gates: {
    dependencyGate: {
      mode: 'error',
      licenseAllowlist: [
        'MIT', 'Apache-2.0', 'ISC',
        'BSD-2-Clause', 'BSD-3-Clause',
      ],
      blockVulnerable: true,   // OSV advisories
      blockDeprecated: true,
      blockEol: true,          // base images
    },
  },
} satisfies BuddyConfig

// computed on your runner, no model
// involved, published as a check run
// your branch protection can require.

🛡️

Advisories from OSV

OSV.dev indexes every ecosystem Buddy supports — npm, Composer, PyPI, crates.io, Go, RubyGems — so a vulnerable dependency blocks the merge everywhere rather than only where one scanner happened to have coverage. It is open data, which means the finding is checkable rather than proprietary.

⚖️

Licence policy that fails closed

Anything not on the allowlist is a violation, and an unknown licence is reported rather than assumed acceptable.

⏳

End of life as its own category

A base image past end of life stops getting patches at all, which outranks any single CVE. blockEol treats it that way rather than waiting for one.

💉

Workflow supply-chain audit

bash injection, dangerous pull_request_target, excessive permissions, unpinned actions, self-hosted exposure, missing timeouts — offline, in seconds.

🔑

Secrets before the push

A narrow, low-false-positive scanner in a pre-commit hook, catching credentials before they reach a remote at all.

🔧

And it fixes what it finds

The same tool that flags the advisory opens the update pull request, with the changelog, and auto-merges it if it is a patch.

Side by side

	Buddy	Snyk
Dependency advisories	✅ OSV	✅ own database, deeper
Licence policy	✅ allowlist	✅ richer policy engine
Opens fix pull requests	✅	✅
SAST / code security scanning	Review findings, workflow audit	✅ dedicated product
Container and IaC scanning	Dockerfile base images, EOL	✅ dedicated products
Compliance reporting, SBOM	`buddy report`	✅ built for auditors
AI code review	✅	—
General dependency updates	✅ all packages, not just vulnerable	✅
Merge gates as check runs	✅	✅
CI repair	✅	—
Runs entirely in your CI	✅	Hosted platform
Pricing model	MIT + your tokens	Per developer, hosted

Product capabilities change; check Snyk's own documentation before deciding on any single row.

Where Snyk is the better choice

This one is easy to be honest about, because they are not really competing for the same budget:

You need a security platform. Vulnerability depth, reachability analysis, container and IaC scanning, SBOM generation, policy across an organisation, and reports written for people who do not read code. Buddy does none of that and is not trying to.
You have a compliance obligation — SOC 2, FedRAMP, an enterprise customer's questionnaire — that names a security vendor. A CLI in your pipeline is not what that box is asking for.
You want curated advisory data with a vendor standing behind the triage, rather than open OSV data.

Where Buddy overlaps usefully

Free coverage everywhere. Every repository you own can run buddy security and buddy review --light today, with no licence and no key. That includes the internal tools and one-off repositories nobody would provision a seat for.
Updates, not just vulnerable updates. Snyk fixes what is vulnerable; Buddy also keeps everything else current, which is how a dependency avoids becoming an unfixable three-major-versions-behind problem later.
CI as an attack surface. The workflow audit covers a class of supply-chain risk that lives in .github/workflows rather than in package.json.
The reviewer. Security findings in a diff are a code review problem as much as a scanning problem.

Running both is entirely reasonable: Snyk for the security programme, Buddy for review, updates and the CI audit.

Security & compliance · Workflow security · Merge gates · All comparisons