What are CI/CD security tools?
CI/CD security tools integrate directly into development pipelines to help teams identify vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and other risks as code moves through build, test, and deployment stages. Each time a change is introduced, these tools automatically scan source code, dependencies, infrastructure configurations (IaC), and build artifacts to highlight potential issues before they reach production.
When paired with modern cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPPs), CI/CD security tools add important context about code and pipeline activity. This includes where vulnerabilities originate, how they relate to cloud configurations, and how they may influence runtime behavior.
By correlating CI/CD findings with cloud and runtime context, teams gain a clearer picture of which issues are actually exposed and impactful in their environment. This makes it easier to prioritize remediation efforts based on real risk, rather than treating all findings equally.
This connected view helps security and development teams make more informed decisions, streamline triage, and reduce the manual effort required to manage risk across different stages of the software development lifecycle.
CI/CD Security Best Practices [Cheat Sheet]
Spot the top 10 CI/CD security risks before attackers do, from weak flow controls to exposed secrets and more in this practical cheat sheet.
What are the evaluation criteria for CI/CD security tools?
When selecting a CI/CD security tool, it helps to evaluate how well the solution aligns with your development workflows, governance needs, and cloud environment. The following criteria provide a structured way to compare options:
Coverage: What technologies does the tool integrate with?
Capabilities: How can it help us (features, attributes, integrations, etc.)?
Developer experience: What is its feedback speed and automated fix rate?
Pipeline performance and scalability: Are the tool’s overhead, parallelization, and caching features in line with our budget and needs?
Governance: Does the tool support business workflows, approvals, and exceptions while meeting compliance and data governance requirements such as data retention, residency, and access controls?
Total cost of ownership: What are the direct and indirect costs of running the solution?
Coverage
First, you’ll want to list all integration requirements of your project, team, and organization. These may include programming languages, CI/CD platforms, cloud providers, package managers, and container engines and orchestrators.
Capabilities
Let’s review the primary features needed to achieve an enhanced security posture.
Scanning
Common CI/CD vulnerability scanning capabilities include SAST, DAST, SCA, secrets detection, IaC analysis, and container image scanning. Many tools also support SBOM generation, which provides software component inventories that can be used for vulnerability analysis, license compliance, and supply chain risk management.
Agentless repository and cloud integration
Installing agents across server fleets takes time and creates maintenance overhead. Modern CI/CD security tools favor API-based integrations for version control systems (VCS) and cloud platforms – connecting via GitHub API, GitLab API, or AWS API without installing software on your infrastructure. Where needed, they use lightweight CLI scanners that run as pipeline steps, not persistent agents. This approach dramatically lowers time to value (TTV) while maintaining comprehensive coverage.
Bidirectional traceability
The security vulnerabilities of cloud applications stem from their code and configuration, so linking them is crucial to contextualize vulnerabilities.
Bidirectional traceability between code bases and cloud services is essential for root-cause analysis and drift prevention.
Unified policy engine
A unified policy engine eliminates the effort needed to keep security policies and guardrails consistent across development and production environments. For example, if you enforce 'no critical vulnerabilities in production,' the same rule applies in pre-commit hooks, pull request checks, and runtime monitoring – without rewriting policies for each stage.
Graph-based risk prioritization
CI/CD security findings are most valuable when they can be evaluated in the context of the broader environment. Effective tools make it possible to correlate code-level issues with deployment, configuration, identity, and exposure data to determine which risks are realistically exploitable.
Graph-based approaches support this type of correlation by modeling relationships across systems and resources. This helps security teams prioritize genuine attack paths and focus remediation efforts on issues that pose real risk, rather than treating all findings as equally critical.
Policy as code (PaC)
PaC lets teams define, enforce, and audit security policies programmatically across your entire software development lifecycle.
Developer experience
In a DevSecOps model, developers play a critical role in improving software security, which makes the developer experience an important factor when evaluating CI/CD security tools.
Tools that integrate naturally into existing workflows, such as pull requests, IDEs, and CI pipelines, and provide faster scan times for quicker feedback cycles are more likely to be adopted consistently. Capabilities like inline PR comments, actionable guidance, and automated remediation suggestions help developers address issues early without disrupting delivery.
Tool attributes like inline comments for PRs, low mean time to feedback, and auto-remediation will help speed up the process and ensure teams run those checks.
Performance and scalability
Running new steps in your CI/CD pipeline can’t overwhelm your systems. Poorly optimized security tools can significantly impact your pipeline's performance due to excessive overhead. And this problem will only grow as you scale over time.
Features to be on the lookout for here include parallel scanning, incremental scanning, and smart caching caches.
Governance
A security tool’s governance capabilities should support real-world workflows, including the ability to define exceptions so teams aren’t blocked by controls that don’t apply in specific situations. It should also align with relevant CI/CD compliance standards and regulatory frameworks for your industry.
In addition, effective tools can map technical controls back to common compliance frameworks and automatically collect supporting evidence. This helps security and compliance teams reduce manual audit effort while maintaining consistent enforcement across development and deployment workflows.
Total cost of ownership
More than just the subscription price, total cost of ownership can include storage costs that grow over time, as well as expenses related to onboarding and training. Some tools require professional services or specialized expertise to deploy and maintain, which can significantly increase initial and ongoing costs.
Integration and maintenance overhead are also important factors to consider. Tools that require frequent updates, custom pipeline logic, or ongoing tuning can add operational burden for engineering and security teams, especially as environments scale. For self-hosted solutions, the cost calculation often involves even more variables, including infrastructure, upgrades, and long-term support.
Secure Coding Best Practices [Cheat Sheet]
The Secure Coding Cheat Sheet is designed to be your comprehensive, go-to resource for embedding security into every stage of your code development. It doesn’t just list recommendations; it provides clear, actionable advice and code examples to help you implement the secure practices.
What are the top 10 CI/CD security tools?
Now that you understand how to evaluate CI/CD pipeline security tools with vulnerability management, let’s discuss the top 10. This list is in order of their G2 score, a market satisfaction rating for software products. Note that G2 scores update quarterly, so rankings may shift as new reviews are published.
1. Wiz Code (G2 Score 4.7/5)
If you want to consolidate your security tooling, Wiz Code is a good candidate. Wiz Code's unified approach links runtime and cloud risk directly to the commits that introduced them. Bidirectional context prioritizes fixes based on real exposure—public reachability (internet-facing workloads), sensitive data paths (access to PII, payment data, credentials), and effective permissions (what identities can actually do, not just what they're granted).
For example, Wiz's security graph might show that a vulnerable container has an IAM role with AdministratorAccess policy attached. But effective permissions analysis reveals the role can only access S3 and DynamoDB due to service control policies and permission boundaries—dramatically reducing actual risk. This prevents wasted effort remediating vulnerabilities in over-permissioned but effectively constrained workloads.
The platform's CIEM (Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management) integration shows not just what permissions exist, but which ones are actively used, which are excessive, and which create privilege escalation paths—all correlated with code-level vulnerabilities to show complete attack chains from code to cloud.
Key capabilities:
Code-to-cloud context correlation, connecting code changes to deployed resources, identity permissions, data exposure, and runtime risk to prioritize issues based on real impact
Unified policy enforcement across development and cloud environments, allowing teams to apply consistent guardrails from pull requests through production without managing separate policy systems
Developer-centric integrations and remediation guidance, including native integrations with popular developer tools and CI/CD platforms, contextual feedback in pull requests and IDEs, and actionable fix recommendations to help teams remediate issues earlier in the lifecycle
2. GitHub Advanced Security (G2 Score 4.7/5)
Is your team already heavily invested in the GitHub platform? GitHub Advanced Security is especially a great choice when used with GitHub Enterprise, as you can seamlessly integrate dependency vulnerability management, secret detection, and code scanning—all with central policy controls.
Key capabilities:
Native GitHub integration
CodeQL semantic analysis
Built-in security advisory database
3. Aikido Security (G2 Score 4.7/5)
If you’re looking to shift your security practices to the left to strengthen your security posture without impacting development velocity, Aikido Security may be your best bet. It offers SAST, SCA, and IaC scanning coupled with automated remediation suggestions.
And since Aikido is a CI/CD security tool focused on developer workflows, your developers might be interested in trying their seamless IDE integrations.
Key capabilities:
Developer-centric design
Automated remediation
Integration with popular IDEs and CI/CD pipelines
4. Snyk (G2 Score 4.5/5)
Heavily invested in open-source software? Snyk is a strong contender due to its open-source dependency management. It comes with container security, IaC scanning, and tight GitHub integration. Plus, Snyk’s intuitive UIs ensure frictionless developer adoption.
Key capabilities:
Huge vulnerability database
Developer-friendly fix suggestions
Broad range of integrations
5. GitLab Ultimate (G2 Score 4.5/5)
If you’re in search of a comprehensive DevSecOps platform, GitLab Ultimate might be the tool for you. A highly integrated ALM solution, it combines security testing (SAST, DAST, SCA) with compliance reporting, providing end-to-end visibility from planning to production.
Key capabilities:
Full-stack DevSecOps lifecycle coverage
OOTB Controls for common compliance frameworks
A unified security dashboard
6. SonarQube (G2 Score 4.4/5)
This tool covers 30+ programming languages, making it an ideal choice for teams that favor niche languages but still want to stay on top of their code security.
SonarQube is an automated code quality tool that uses static analysis to evaluate the security posture of your codebase. Its integration of code reviews in PRs and CI pipelines removes a lot of the friction usually associated with CI/CD security tools.
Key capabilities:
Open-source and commercial options
Strong IDE and CI integration
Actionable feedback for developers
7. Aqua Security (G2 Score 4.2/5)
Runtime threat detection paired with static codebase scans is the combination that powers Aqua Security.
As a cloud-native security platform, its focus lies on container-based applications, especially those running on Kubernetes. Aqua Security’s container image scans ensure that security vulnerabilities are identified before they’re deployed to production.
Key capabilities:
Runtime protection
Kubernetes-native controls
Full lifecycle container security
8. Checkmarx One (G2 Score 4.2/5)
Checkmarx One is an enterprise-focused application security platform offering SAST, SCA, and API security testing for complex, heavily regulated environments. It’s a great fit for large enterprises with legacy code, stringent compliance requirements, and detailed reporting/governance demands.
Key capabilities:
Static application security testing with advanced dataflow and control-flow analysis
Broad language support
Enterprise-grade reporting and workflow integration
9. JFrog Xray (G2 Score 4.2/5)
JFrog Xray is an SCA tool with an enterprise focus. It helps organizations identify security vulnerabilities and license compliance issues in open-source software by continuously scanning dependencies and evaluating them for operational security risks.
This is a top choice if you use a large number of third-party software solutions in your products and services.
Key capabilities:
Continuous dependency scanning
Integration with widely used IDEs and CI/CD platforms
Insights regarding the OSS licenses used in your projects through automatic SBOM generation
10. Black Duck (G2 Score 4/5)
Looking to manage potential risks from open-source components in your software supply chain? Black Duck is an open-source security and SCA platform with comprehensive vulnerability detection and license compliance management.
Key capabilities:
Extensive open-source component database
Detailed vulnerability information
Extensive license compliance reporting
Is Wiz the right CI/CD security tool for you?
Developers face continuous pressure to deliver software fast. However, velocity cannot come at the cost of security. While modern CI/CD security tools help teams avoid this sacrifice, companies need to find a highly integrated tool that serves multiple use cases and meets the requirements of every team.
Wiz Code addresses the challenges of tool sprawl and context-poor alerts by providing unified code-to-cloud visibility—helping teams understand which vulnerabilities actually pose a risk in their specific cloud environment.
Wiz offers agentless onboarding across repositories and cloud providers, with a unified policy engine that enforces security guardrails across development and production environments. This drastically slashes the effort required to manage security scans and remediation, easing the shift left security journey.
Wiz boosts the developer experience, guaranteeing they stay focused and productive with:
PR-based fixes
IDE guardrails
Contextual risk prioritization
Automated remediation suggestions
Smooth integration into existing workflows
With its unified platform approach, Wiz reduces complexity, resulting in your security team achieving faster remediation through clear ownership and traceability—from cloud to code.
Ready to see Wiz Code in action? See how unified code-to-cloud context, agentless onboarding, and developer guardrails help teams fix what matters—fast. Book a demo to see how Wiz reduces alert fatigue by 90% while accelerating remediation through clear ownership and automated fixes.
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