Trivy is an open-source scanner from Aqua Security that checks containers, filesystems, and IaC for known CVEs, exposed secrets and misconfigurations. It runs locally on your machine, or CI/CD runner, with no backend to deploy or maintain.
A lightweight product has limitations. Trivy doesn't check if vulnerabilities are actually reachable so findings are noisy. It reports problems but doesn't fix them. And it has no SAST engine, meaning it won't touch the code you actually wrote.
Additionally, Trivy has been compromised by supply chain attacks twice in 2026, which is a real problem for security teams that want a tool that helps them with security rather than hinders it, particularly as Trivy runs in CI/CD with access to your secrets.
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Between the gaps and the breaches, plenty of teams are weighing what else is out there. Here are six alternatives and where each one fits:
- Aikido Security
- Checkov
- Grype
- Snyk
- Wiz
- Sysdig secure
TL;DR
Aikido Security is the best Trivy alternative in 2026. It does everything Trivy does, securing container images, SCA, IaC, and secrets, and goes beyond it with a complete platform securing the entire SDLC. Where Trivy merely produces a list of CVEs, Aikido finds vulnerabilities that haven't been assigned a CVE through its open source intelligence feed, and opens a pull request to remediate them. Aikido's reachability analysis and AutoTriage cut the noise by over 90%. Aikido also offers CVE-free images of the same version you run. That prioritization goes further on the cloud side, where Aikido re-scores a container's CVEs by the environment they run in. Aikido backs open source directly, maintaining Opengrep, Zen, SafeChain, and Betterleaks, and its pricing is flat-rate with a free tier that doesn't expire, so cost doesn't climb every time you add an engineer.
What Trivy aims to do
Trivy is a free, open-source scanner that does a good job of catching known CVEs in packages, container images, and IaC by matching them against public vulnerability databases. It's fast, runs from a single command, and costs nothing, which is why it's easy to drop into a CI/CD pipeline and run on every build. On top of the CVE checks, it generates SBOMs in CycloneDX and SPDX, so you get a dependency inventory out of the same scan.
Why teams are looking for a Trivy alternative
Compromised twice in 2026
Trivy has been hit by supply chain attacks twice in 2026. On February 27, attackers abused a pull_request_target
misconfiguration to steal a privileged token from Aqua's CI. Aqua rotated credentials, but the cleanup wasn't complete, and three weeks later the same attackers reused a still-valid credential to rewrite the version tags on Trivy's GitHub Action, so any pipeline pulling the scanner by tag ran a credential stealer before the real scan. A scanner runs inside CI/CD with access to your secrets, which makes it a high-value target.
Rule-based scanner
Trivy works by matching what it finds against public vulnerability feeds. In its first year, Aikido Intel found that 67% of packages with vulnerabilities were never disclosed to any public database. Malware almost never gets a CVE; malicious packages are pulled from registries within hours, and it follows a completely different lifecycle than a disclosed vulnerability, so a scanner waiting on a database entry never sees it. And the databases themselves are falling behind. NIST's NVD received 263% more CVE submissions while enriching only 45% more, and has now shifted to a risk-based approach where many CVEs get added but never analyzed.
No SAST
Trivy looks up known vulnerabilities in the packages, images, and configs around your application, but it has no static analysis engine for the code you actually wrote. It won't catch an injection flaw or a broken access-control bug in your source.
Findings, no fixes
Trivy finds problems, tells you what's wrong, and stops there. It has no read on which vulnerabilities are actually reachable in your code or exposed in your environment, which means a lot of noise. For the vulnerabilities that you determine are real exposure, it's on you to solve them, which, on a real image can mean hundreds of items.
Gated governance
Governance is gated too. Centralized management, RBAC-style control, and advanced reporting require Trivy server or the commercial offering, so the free binary most teams start with doesn't give you much to manage it across a large org.
What to look for in a Trivy alternative
- Coverage: Trivy never scans with SAST, and the undisclosed vulnerabilities and malware a database-fed tool won't list.
- Prioritization: Look for reachability and exploitability scoring that tells you which findings are actually triggerable in your code or exposed in your environment
- Remediation: Look for a tool that opens the fix itself and warns you when it would break something or introduce a new issue,
- A tool you can trust: Trivy's compromises are a reminder that the security tool is part of your supply chain. Check how a project is maintained, and how quickly and cleanly the maintainers respond when something goes wrong.
Top Trivy alternatives in 2026
Aikido Security
Aikido Security does everything Trivy does in the container and supply-chain space, and picks up where Trivy leaves off. It finds the same vulnerable OS packages and dependencies in your images, plus outdated runtimes, malware, and license risks, and it scans IaC and secrets like Trivy does. It also generates CycloneDX and SPDX SBOMs.
Trivy hands back a raw CVE list at uniform severity, while Aikido runs reachability analysis and AutoTriage, which is how it reduces false positives over-90%. Aikido Intel adds coverage Trivy's database doesn't have, catching malware and CVE-less vulnerabilities early, and SafeChain blocks malicious packages at install before they reach a running environment. When something's worth fixing, AutoFix opens the pull request and flags whether the fix introduces a new issue, so the work doesn't fall back on a developer.
If you're leaving Trivy, you probably care that a tool pulls its weight in open source rather than just selling against it. Aikido is the lead maintainer of Opengrep, the community fork of Semgrep created after that project's license change, and it maintains Zen for in-app runtime protection, SafeChain to block malicious packages at install, and Betterleaks for secret detection. Its Intel feed, which catches malware and undisclosed vulnerabilities before they hit a database, is open-source too.
Aikido's hardened images are CVE-free, drop-in base image replacements that backport fixes instead of forcing a version jump, shipping with an SBOM, VEX exploitability status, and SLSA provenance on every pull from docker.aikido.io. And on the cloud side, Aikido ties a container's CVEs back to the environment it runs in and re-scores severity by context. For enterprises, all of this runs under consistent policy across every repo and pipeline with compliance-mapped reporting.
Pricing works differently from most commercial tools here as well. Aikido is flat-rate with a free tier that doesn't expire, and paid tiers are sold as fixed bundles covering a set number of users rather than per seat, so the cost is known upfront and doesn't creep every time you hire. That matters most against per-seat tools, where the bill climbs with headcount whether or not usage does.
Best for: Teams that want Trivy's coverage plus the things it lacks, such as reachability that cuts the noise, automated fixes, hardened images, and cloud context, with enterprise-grade governance.
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Checkov
Checkov is open-source IaC static analysis for Terraform, CloudFormation, Kubernetes, and ARM, from the Bridgecrew team, now maintained by Palo Alto. Its built-in policy library and support for custom policies give it deeper misconfiguration coverage than Trivy's IaC checks, so this is a step up on that one axis.
It's also narrower than Trivy in every other way. Checkov only does IaC, so it replaces one part of the tool and leaves images, dependencies, and secrets scanning to something else. It has documented false negatives, and its missing severity mappings make findings hard to rank, which turns into alert fatigue.
Best for: Teams that mainly used Trivy for IaC and want more depth there, but you'll be stitching Checkov together with two or three other tools to get back the coverage Trivy gave you in one.
Grype
Grype is Anchore's open-source vulnerability matcher for container images and filesystems. It's fast, pairs with Syft to generate SBOMs, and outputs SARIF and CycloneDX, which makes it an easy drop-in if all you want from Trivy is the container CVE check.
That's also all it does. There's no IaC, misconfiguration, or secrets coverage, so it's a partial swap rather than a Trivy replacement, and teams running it in production have flagged a vulnerability database that lags behind alongside gaps in OS-level CVE coverage.
Best for: teams that want the container CVE piece and nothing else, but the moment you need IaC, secrets, or anything past image matching, you're back to running multiple tools.
Snyk
Snyk is a commercial developer security platform covering open-source dependencies, containers, and IaC. It beats Trivy by scoring findings by exploitability, recommending base-image upgrades, and surfacing fix advice directly in pull requests and IDEs.
The catch is that it doesn't solve the noise problem you'd be leaving Trivy for. Snyk's scans generate plenty of false positives. Teams running it in production also report blind spots in intermediate build layers and rate-limiting friction with public registries. Snyk is priced per developer seat, so the bill multiplies with every hire, which is what makes it expensive for larger teams regardless of how much scanning they actually do.
Best for: Teams that want guided remediation inside their existing workflows, but if the reason you're leaving Trivy is a noisy, unprioritized list, Snyk isn't different enough to be the fix.
Wiz
Wiz is an agentless cloud security platform that reads your cloud environment and container images together, correlating image vulnerabilities with cloud assets, identities, configuration, and attack paths to show what's actually exposed and running. It gives you findings tied to cloud exposure, which is more than a scanner gives you.
It's also a different class of product than Trivy, with the cost and weight to match. Wiz carries significant operational overhead, generates a high alert volume of its own, and users run into reporting limitations.
Best for: Teams that want cloud exposure context and can fund a full platform to get it, but as a straight replacement for a free CI scanner it's heavy, expensive, and aimed at a different job.
Sysdig Secure
Sysdig Secure is a cloud and container security platform with runtime detection. It prioritizes vulnerabilities in packages actually loaded at runtime and flags threats in live workloads, which Trivy doesn't do.
The rest of the platform is less even. Its CSPM coverage is comparatively weak, and its Kubernetes monitoring only notifies rather than acting on what it finds. And for on-prem code hosts, Sysdig copies your code to its SaaS platform to scan it, which not every team can sign off on.
Best for: teams that specifically need runtime detection on top of pre-deploy scanning, but the platform-level setup and agent overhead are overkill if image checks were all you wanted from Trivy.
FAQ

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