Draugr and Snyk

They are not the same kind of thing, which is the most useful fact about comparing them.

Most "Snyk alternative" lists compare scanners to scanners. Draugr is not a scanner, so the honest comparison is a different shape, and the shape is the point.

The short version

Snyk is a scanner and a platform. Draugr is the layer above scanners. If you drop Snyk you still need something to do the finding, and Draugr's defaults are the open-source tools most teams would have picked anyway: Trivy for dependencies and images, Semgrep for source, Gitleaks for secrets. What Draugr adds is what a bag of scanners does not have, one descriptor, one merged report, one verdict, and a ranking that knows which of your services faces the internet.

So "replace Snyk with Draugr" is not quite the right question. The right one is whether the open-source stack plus a gate does what you are currently paying a platform for.

What Snyk does that an open-source stack does not

Worth reading before the rest, because if any of these is why you bought it, the rest does not matter.

• Reachability beyond Go. Snyk answers this across the languages it supports. Draugr answers it for Go: a call graph from govulncheck, the path from your own code to the vulnerable function carried in the report, and three verdicts rather than two, so an analysis that did not run is never reported as one that found nothing. Outside Go you get the package-level answer, and if your stack is mostly Java or JavaScript that is the real difference. Where Draugr does answer, the verdict ranks a finding down rather than removing it, so what was set aside is still in the report with the evidence attached.
• A curated advisory database. Snyk's research team publishes advisories ahead of public feeds and with their own metadata. Trivy reads public sources. Most of the time this does not matter; in the window after a disclosure, it can.
• Automated fix pull requests. Snyk opens them, tests them and keeps them current. Draugr tells you what to fix; it does not fix it.
• A platform. Dashboards, org-wide policy, historical trend, role-based access. Draugr produces a verdict and an artifact; where those go afterwards is your CI's problem.

What Draugr does that Snyk doesn't

• Nothing leaves your pipeline. Draugr is a binary that runs in your CI and talks to nothing. Snyk is a SaaS platform: your dependency graph, and with Snyk Code your source, are analyzed on their infrastructure. If you are in a regulated environment, or answering a questionnaire about where your code is processed, that is a shorter answer.
• Ranking that knows what is exposed. The same CVE is urgent on an internet-facing gateway and a backlog item on an internal batch job. Draugr knows which is which because your descriptor says so. That context is not in the code, so no scanner can infer it.
• Everything past code and dependencies. Live host TLS, HTTP security headers, Kubernetes posture against CIS, dependency licenses, SBOM generation and VEX output, from the same descriptor and the same gate.
• Scanner-agnostic, permanently. Every control names its scanner, and you can change it. That includes commercial ones you already pay for. The point is that the descriptor, the gate and the report do not change when the scanner does.
• Apache-2.0, and no seat maths. No per-developer counting, no committer window, no tier where the useful feature lives.

So which

Keep Snyk if reachability across languages Draugr does not cover yet is doing real work for you, if fix pull requests are how your dependencies get updated, or if the platform is what several teams coordinate through. Those are the things an assembled stack does not replace, and the first two are good.

Look at Draugr if what you want is a gate rather than a dashboard, if your risk lives in images and infrastructure as much as in packages, if you would rather your code were not analyzed off-site, or if you have already assembled the open-source scanners and the problem is that nothing joins them up.

Trying it takes two commands

$ curl -fsSL https://draugr.dev/install.sh | sh
$ draugr scan .   # sca, secrets, sast, iac, no descriptor needed

Point it at a repository you already scan and compare the two reports. The documentationcovers descriptors and CI wiring, and Learn explains the controls themselves. There is also a comparison with GitHub Advanced Security, which is a closer substitution than this one.