Aikido comes up a lot because it is the consolidation play. One dashboard, every scanner, fair price. So it is worth being straight about where that model is genuinely strong and where it quietly falls short.
Where Aikido is good
Credit where it is due, Aikido covers an absurd amount of surface area. SAST, SCA, IaC, container scanning, secrets, DAST, cloud posture, a runtime firewall, AI pentests, all in one place. If your problem is "we have six point tools and a mess of dashboards," Aikido genuinely solves that, and it is reasonably priced and developers like it. As a consolidation tool it is a good product, and we are not pretending to do half of what it does.
It is also worth saying plainly: Aikido does AutoTriage and AutoFix, and it opens pull requests. So this is not the lazy "they only find, we fix" comparison. They fix too.
Where the model has a ceiling
That breadth comes from bundling a stack of scanners under the hood. The actual SAST detection is largely open source engines doing the finding. Aikido's real value is the layer on top: triage to cut the noise, autofix to open the PR.
Which is great, for the vulns the underlying scanner actually found.
You cannot triage a bug you never detected.
You cannot autofix a bug you never detected.
The clever workflow runs after detection, not instead of it.
And detection is exactly where pattern based engines hit their limit. Business logic flaws, auth that breaks across files, second order injection, race conditions. The stuff that does not match a signature. Polishing the workflow around a scanner does not change what the scanner is able to see in the first place.
The receipts
RealVuln is our open benchmark: 676 real vulnerabilities across 26 production repositories, plus 120 false positive traps to catch tools that flag everything to inflate recall.
RealVuln
- 676 real vulnerabilities
- 26 production repos
- 120 false positive traps
- fully open source
The pattern based engines that power most all-in-one SAST sit at the bottom of that leaderboard. Aikido is not on it by name, but it runs the same open source engines for SAST, so you can do the maths. And because the whole thing is open source, you do not have to trust ours, you can run your own setup against it.
So which one
This is not "Aikido bad." It is a genuine difference in shape. Aikido is the widest net, covering code, cloud, containers and runtime in one platform. We are the deepest net on the one part that matters most, finding the code vulnerability before any of the workflow cleverness gets a chance to run.
Pick based on which problem you actually have. If it is "too many tools," Aikido. If it is "our scanner keeps missing the real ones," that is us.
Full breakdown and the benchmark: https://kolega.dev/compare/aikido/
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