Free and open source scanners are often enough for a small team with a few applications: they find vulnerable dependencies and produce a list. What they usually leave to you is ownership, history, exceptions, reporting and integrations. Add a platform when that manual work becomes the larger cost.
What free tools do well
They detect known vulnerable packages, run in CI, and cost nothing to try. Many are well maintained, with open rules you can read. For a startup with a handful of repositories this is a sensible place to begin.
What you will build yourself
Aggregation across repositories. A place to track status over time. Exception handling with expiry. Reports for a customer or auditor. Routing to owners. Some teams script all of this and are happy. Others find the glue code becomes a part time job.
Costs that are not on the invoice
Maintenance of scripts, updating rule sets, handling false positives alone, and onboarding each new repository by hand. Count engineer hours honestly, not just licence fees.
Signs you are ready for more
More than a few teams. Customer security reviews asking for evidence. Findings arriving from several tools. A backlog nobody can summarize. A person whose main job has become copying data between tools.
A sensible test
Run a free scanner for a month and log the hours spent on everything except fixing. If that figure is small, stay. If it keeps growing, evaluate platforms against that real number.
Mixing is fine
You can keep a free scanner as a data source and put workflow on top. Check any platform can ingest standard formats from tools you already trust.
If you do stay with free tools, write a one page runbook: what runs where, who reads the output, and how exceptions are recorded. That small habit keeps a free setup auditable and makes any later migration easier.
Where Safeguard fits
Safeguard has a free scan at gold.safeguard.sh/scan that you can run on a repository without setting anything up. Beyond that it covers SBOM and dependency scanning, reachability analysis, and policies and gates.
Try it yourself
Click through the inventory view and compare what you get against the raw list a free command line scanner would print.
Click through it at your own pace, or open it full screen.
Quick check
Is free scanning less accurate?
Not necessarily. Accuracy depends on the data and matching logic, so test it with seeded vulnerabilities.
When should I pay for something?
When workflow effort around the scanner exceeds the cost of a tool.
Last reviewed: 19 October 2026.
