Seaworthy vs Snyk: which works better for indie developers?

Two tools, very different assumptions

Snyk and Seaworthy are both trying to catch problems in your codebase before they bite you. That's where the similarity ends. They were built for different developers, with different mental models of what "a problem" even looks like.

Snyk was built for teams that have a security team. There is an enterprise sales motion, a Jira integration, a compliance dashboard, and a priority score system that makes more sense once you have a CVE triage rotation. None of that is a criticism — it is the right product for a company with a security engineer on staff.

Seaworthy was built for people who are not that. Its target is what the project calls "vibe coders": developers building with heavy AI assistance who are shipping quickly and may have skipped some of the boring-but-important stuff along the way. If you have never heard of SECURITY.md, have no idea what your dependency update policy is, or quietly know your .env file has been in more places than it should be, that is the audience.

What Snyk actually catches

Snyk's main strength is known vulnerability detection in dependencies. It keeps a live database of CVEs, maps them to your installed package versions, and tells you which ones are exploitable and how to fix them. It also does SAST (static application security testing) for things like SQL injection and hardcoded secrets in code.

The free tier is fairly generous: unlimited open source scanning, limited SAST, one developer. The paid plans start around $25/month per developer.

# Typical Snyk workflow
npm install -g snyk
snyk auth
snyk test
snyk monitor

The output is detailed. Maybe too detailed if you are a solo developer trying to figure out if your weekend project is going to embarrass you. You will get a wall of CVEs, many of which are in transitive dependencies you have no control over, and a severity score that tells you very little about whether you actually need to worry.

What Seaworthy actually catches

Seaworthy does not try to replace Snyk's CVE database. It scans across six categories: security, resilience, ops basics, dependency hygiene, configuration, and data exposure. It is looking for things that are often invisible to traditional SAST tools but are obvious risks for a solo project or small team.

Things like: no rate limiting on auth endpoints, missing security headers, secrets that might be leaking through environment configuration, no health check endpoint, hardcoded timeouts or retry logic that will fail badly under real load.

npx seaworthycode

That is the entire invocation. It scans the current repo and prints a categorised report. The VS Code extension does the same inline as you work. Pro tier (the one with all the checks) is £2.99/month.

The checks are opinionated in a way Snyk is not. Seaworthy will tell you your app has no graceful shutdown handling. Snyk does not care about that — it is not a CVE. But for a developer who learned to build by shipping fast with AI help, that kind of gap is exactly where production incidents come from.

Where each tool wins

Snyk wins on depth of dependency vulnerability coverage. If you need to know about a CVE in a transitive dependency of a library you are using, Snyk will find it. It also has integrations with GitHub, GitLab, and most CI platforms, so you can block PRs on new vulnerabilities automatically. For a team that needs to demonstrate security posture to a customer or auditor, Snyk's reports are the right format.

Seaworthy wins on breadth of concern and simplicity of setup. One command, no account required for the free tier, no configuration file needed to get started. The checks cover things that are genuinely likely to matter for a small project: missing CORS configuration, no robots.txt, auth routes without brute-force protection.

I genuinely do not know how to feel about the category of "no SECURITY.md file" being a check. On one hand it feels a bit cargo-cult. On the other hand, I have seen that file catch a real security report that would otherwise have gone nowhere, so maybe the cargo-cult version of the thing still does the job.

Should you use both?

Probably yes, if you can be bothered. They do not overlap much. Snyk is scanning your dependency tree against a CVE database. Seaworthy is looking at your code's behaviour and configuration for patterns that suggest operational or security gaps.

Running both takes about two minutes. Snyk catches the dependency risk you did not know about. Seaworthy catches the things you knew were rough but had not gotten around to fixing.

If you have to pick one as a solo developer: start with Seaworthy. The checks map more directly to things that will cause you a bad day on a real project. You can add Snyk's free tier later when you have a package-lock.json worth scanning seriously.

The honest summary

Snyk is a mature, well-funded security tool with enterprise DNA. It does one category of thing very well and has built a large ecosystem around it. The pricing assumes a team.

Seaworthy is a newer tool that covers more ground but less deeply. It costs less than a coffee per month for the full check suite and can be run without signing up for anything. The VS Code extension means you can get feedback inline instead of as a separate pipeline step.

Neither tool is a substitute for actually thinking about security. Both are better than nothing. Seaworthy includes checks across six categories including data exposure and resilience, which puts it in a different lane from pure dependency scanners like Snyk.