Snyk scans for vulnerable dependencies, and does it well enough that most teams evaluating us already own it. Kusari works a layer above: it resolves the dependency graph from source, treats build provenance and attestations as first-class data, and normalizes the scanners you already run into a single queryable graph. Snyk tells you what it found; Kusari tells you which of it is reachable, how widely the component is used across your estate, and where the evidence is missing. Keep Snyk if you like it — Kusari is what makes its findings mean something.
Most of the overlap is real. The differences cluster in depth, evidence, and whether findings from other tools have anywhere to go.
| Capability | Kusari | Snyk |
|---|---|---|
| Full-depth transitive dependency detection | Yes | Partial Manifest-derived |
| VEX document generation | Yes | No |
| Assembles vendor and supplier SBOMs into one graph | Yes | No |
| SBOM storage and management | Yes | No |
| Flag low OpenSSF Scorecard scores in pull requests | Yes | No |
| Identify unmaintained or EOL dependencies | Yes | Partial Explicitly-deprecated only |
| Natural language dependency graph queries | Yes | No |
| Ingests third-party scanner results | Yes | No |
| Identify vulnerable dependencies | Yes | Yes |
| Open source license policy enforcement | Yes | Yes |
| Static code analysis (SAST) | Yes | Yes |
| Reachability analysis | Yes | Partial Per scanned project |
| Context-aware vulnerability prioritization | Yes | Partial Priority Score, per project |
Snyk is a good product with a large install base, and the teams we talk to who own it mostly bought it for sound reasons. Those reasons hold up.
Ecosystem coverage is broad and mature. Years of work across a long list of languages and package managers, with a research team maintaining the advisory data behind it. That depth of coverage is expensive to build and Snyk has built it.
Developers will actually use it. The IDE plugins, the CLI and the pull request integration land where engineers already work, and adoption follows. Plenty of security tools never clear that bar.
It covers a lot of ground in one product. Open source, code, containers and infrastructure as code under one contract, which is a real advantage when the alternative is four vendors and four integrations.
For a focused estate, that may be the whole job. If your questions stop at "does this project contain a known vulnerability," Snyk answers them, and nothing on this page is an argument for turning it off.
Usually at scale, and usually as the same complaint: more findings than anyone can act on, and no way to defend the order they get worked in.
The scoring stops at the project boundary. Snyk has reachability analysis and a Priority Score, and both do useful work inside the project being scanned. Neither can weigh a finding against the rest of your estate, because Snyk has no model of the rest of your estate. So the question that actually decides your week — is this the component sitting under ninety services or the one in a retired internal tool — has no answer in the console, and the person who picked the order has nothing to point at when challenged.
Depth is derived from the manifest. A manifest declares what software is supposed to contain. It's written before the build and never records what the build resolved, so vendored code, pinned commits and transitive packages the manifest never named sit outside the picture. With 95% of open source vulnerabilities living in transitive dependencies, that's a large share of your software being reasoned about indirectly.
Findings from your other tools have nowhere to go. Snyk reports what Snyk found. It doesn't ingest results from the scanners you also run, so correlating four consoles that disagree stays a human job, and the SBOMs your suppliers send you have no home at all.
There's no evidence layer underneath. No VEX generation, no SBOM storage, no assembly of vendor SBOMs into something queryable. When an auditor asks what you shipped, what was in it and how you decided what to leave unfixed, scanner history is not the artifact they're asking for.
Nothing tells you what it doesn't know. An empty result and an unanalyzed region of your estate look identical. Kusari's tooling declares whether its dependency tree data is complete or incomplete, with confidence evidence attached, which is the difference between a clean report and a clean report you can rely on.
It's a graph of your estate that scanners feed, with Snyk as one of the feeds.
Kusari resolves the dependency graph from source at build, across every repository connected to it, and keeps it current as code moves. Build provenance and attestations are first-class data in that graph, so "where did this come from and can we trust the build that made it" is a property of the record instead of an investigation.
Your existing scanners become inputs. Repositories, dependencies, SBOMs and third-party scanner findings all normalize into one queryable model — the intelligence layer above your existing stack. Snyk keeps running and its findings land in the same graph as everything else, which is what turns "do we have this, and where" into a query.
Kusari Score ranks across the estate. Technical severity weighed against how widely the affected component is used everywhere you run it, adjusted for whether anyone is exploiting it. A CISA KEV listing sets a floor of 9 out of 10, EPSS sets one where there's no KEV entry, and reachability analysis or a VEX document you provide takes an application out of the calculation when the vulnerable path can't be reached. Every ranking keeps its reasoning attached, which is the part that matters when someone asks you to justify the order.
Evidence comes out of it, and you can ask it questions. SBOMs get generated and stored, including the ones suppliers send you, VEX documents get produced, and low OpenSSF Scorecard results get flagged in the pull request. The graph answers natural language queries, so the blast-radius question after a disclosure takes a sentence.
Fixes are traced to root cause. One pull request covering code, config and lockfile, validated by CI, then re-scanned by a separate inspection agent for anything the fix introduced. Anything it isn't confident about gets escalated instead of shipped.
Kusari's founders co-created the open standards now used by Google, Microsoft, Intel, Citi and Red Hat to secure their own supply chains.
Keep Snyk if you like it. Kusari is what makes its findings mean something.
There's no rip-and-replace here. A large Snyk install is an argument for keeping it running, and we treat it as one. Kusari connects to your source control and your pipelines, ingests what Snyk already produces, and ranks it alongside everything else in the graph. The usual first step is running both for a few weeks and comparing the two lists, which is the only way to find out whether the difference described here shows up on your estate specifically. If Snyk isn't the only thing you're weighing, you can compare Kusari against other supply chain security tools on the hub.
Three things worth planning for:
Building the graph from source needs CI access, so this starts with a conversation with whoever owns your pipelines. Most teams go repo by repo instead of all at once, which makes it a smaller ask than it sounds.
Ranking across the estate moves things. Findings your team has been carrying for months can drop off as unreachable, and something nobody had flagged can come to the top because the component sits under half your services. Nothing is deleted, and every change keeps its reasoning on the record.
If your Jira automation, exception workflow and reporting are wired deep into Snyk, pointing them at a new source of truth takes engineering time you'll have to find. Running both for a while buys you that time.
Not as a swap, no. Kusari isn't a scanner and doesn't try to replace one. What it replaces is the assumption that a pile of scanner findings adds up to knowing what you ship. Kusari resolves the dependency graph from source, takes Snyk's findings as one input, and ranks everything by what's exploitable in your environment.
Most teams don't, and we don't ask them to. Snyk has broad ecosystem coverage and a research team behind its advisory data, and both of those keep being useful once Kusari is in place. It becomes one input to the graph, and its findings get unified with everything else instead of living in their own console.
Because reachability answers a question about one project, and the hard question spans the estate. Snyk can tell you whether a vulnerable function is called in the project it just scanned. Kusari resolves one graph across every repository you own, so it can also tell you how widely that component is used, which applications actually reach it, and what the smallest change is that fixes it everywhere at once.
Yes. Ingesting third-party scanner results is the whole point of the graph: repositories, dependencies, SBOMs and scanner output all normalize into one queryable model. That's what makes "do we have this, and where" a query instead of a correlation exercise across four consoles that disagree.
Depth and evidence. Snyk derives its dependency picture largely from the manifest, so anything that arrived another way — vendored code, pinned commits, transitive packages the manifest never named — falls outside it. Kusari also treats build provenance and attestations as first-class data, generates and stores SBOMs including ones your suppliers send you, produces VEX documents, and declares when its own dependency data is incomplete.
Less than thirty minutes on a public repository. We run it live, you watch, and you keep any pull requests it opens.
We run Kusari on a public repo of your choice, live, for thirty minutes. It resolves the dependency tree, sorts what's affected from what isn't, and ranks what's left by Kusari Score. If you want us to, we'll open pull requests for anything currently open and fixable before the time is up, and you keep those whether or not you decide to keep talking to us.