ConformOps is not an SCA, SAST, DAST or container-scanning replacement, and it will not be. It consumes evidence about controls; the tools that produce that evidence are better at producing it than we would be.
Category comparison
An SBOM is not a CRA evidence chain.
An SBOM tells you what is inside the product. A vulnerability tool tells you what may be vulnerable. Both are necessary, neither is the CRA problem - and if you already run good security tooling, the right question is not whether to replace it but what to connect it to.
Three different questionsSBOM tooling answers Vulnerability tooling answers ConformOps answers
Each tool answers one of them well.
“What is inside this product?”
Component inventory, transitive graph, licences, build and container awareness. Done at build time by something that watches the build, it is authoritative in a way no manifest reader can match.
“What in it may be vulnerable?”
Multiple feeds, advisory enrichment, reachability, prioritisation, developer remediation and CI gates. This is a deep speciality and buying it from a specialist is the right call.
“What supports each CRA obligation, and what is missing?”
Requirements with legal citations, evidence with source provenance, gaps and unassessed risk kept visible, human decisions recorded, Article 14 cases, and controlled documents. Components and CVEs are inputs to that, not the point of it.
Keep your engineering workflowInventory and vulnerability management SBOM and security scanning Dependency alerts and update PRs
What if I already use Snyk, Trivy or Dependabot?
Keep using them. Their inventories, findings and fixes support CRA work; the next step is connecting that evidence to a specific release, requirement and accountable decision.
Snyk
Snyk explicitly positions its capabilities around the Cyber Resilience Act: CycloneDX and SPDX SBOM generation, ongoing dependency monitoring, vulnerability prioritisation and remediation guidance. It also describes asset visibility and disclosure workflows as support for reporting.
Keep Snyk. Feed its authoritative output into the evidence chain.
Use the release SBOM as the supplied inventory in ConformOps. Preserve the scan context and remediation record alongside it; an inventory or a fixed finding does not by itself settle a manufacturer's CRA obligations.
Trivy
Trivy generates CycloneDX and SPDX SBOMs and scans targets such as container images and repositories for security issues. Its vulnerability, misconfiguration and secret scanning provide strong upstream engineering evidence.
That scan output is an input to technical documentation. It does not itself supply the manufacturer's product scope, legal mapping, risk acceptance or approval decisions.
Source: Trivy SBOM documentation and scanning documentation
Keep Trivy in the build pipeline. Supply the release inventory and retain the scan target, tool version and fix verification so the evidence remains interpretable.
Dependabot
Dependabot alerts identify known vulnerable dependencies. When security updates are enabled, Dependabot can open pull requests to update them. These are a remediation mechanism and a source of evidence about how an issue was handled.
Source: GitHub's Dependabot alerts and security updates
Keep Dependabot fixing dependencies. Retain the alert, merged fix, test results and release reference. An update PR alone does not establish that the fix shipped, and Dependabot's alerts and updates do not constitute a CRA evidence-management system.
Public documentation reviewed . These summaries describe the documented capabilities and our interpretation of their role in the evidence chain, not an exhaustive assessment of each platform.
From engineering to the technical file
Keep the tools. Connect the evidence.
This is an evidence handover, not an automatic vendor integration. ConformOps accepts CycloneDX JSON or SPDX JSON SBOMs per release through the UI or its Continuous CLI/API workflow, with scoped credentials and engineering release gates. Findings and remediation records remain supporting evidence you curate; there is no automatic import of these vendors' alerts or pull requests. Dependabot contributes alerts and fixes, not every artifact shown here.
Snyk / Trivy / Dependabot
Keep inventory, scanning and dependency updates in your engineering workflow.
CycloneDX / SPDX + findings + remediation evidence
Bind the SBOM, scan context and verified fixes to the release they describe.
ConformOps
Retain the supplied SBOM with hashes and provenance. Review an explainable document-quality score and observed repository coverage while shipped completeness stays unverified. Compare release component changes in History and retain attributed VEX-style affectedness decisions with supporting references and superseded history. These records are not standards-format VEX interchange.
Requirement
Connect evidence to cited CRA requirements. Missing support remains visible.
Decision
Record the responsible person's review. Tool output never grants approval.
Technical file
Carry the traceability into an Annex VII-oriented working draft, with unresolved work and approval gates visible.
Side by side
Where each category is genuinely stronger.
“Dedicated tooling” describes the category, not a named vendor. Depth varies widely between products - check your own.
QuestionDedicated SBOM / security toolingConformOps
Components and security depth - the specialists' ground
Component inventoryBuild- and container-aware discovery; the category's core competency.Specialists strongerA supplied CycloneDX or SPDX SBOM becomes the release inventory. Otherwise a derived inventory from recognised dependency documents across eleven-plus ecosystems.
Dependency graph depthTransitive resolution, build integration, vendored and system libraries.Specialists strongerDeterministic documents only. Declared version ranges are recorded as written and never resolved into a version; native builds are reported as partially observable.
License analysisCommonly included.Not in the product.
Vulnerability feed breadthMultiple public and commercial feeds with advisory enrichment.Specialists strongerOSV across eleven ecosystems plus CISA KEV context. Components without an exact version and package URL are reported as not correlatable rather than silently dropped.
Reachability analysisAvailable in mature SCA products; genuinely valuable for triage.Specialists strongerNot offered. ConformOps records a human affectedness decision with its justification instead of computing exploitability.
SAST / DASTCore category capability.Not offered, and not planned. Repository code is never executed.
Container and image scanningCore category capability.Not offered.
CI security gatesCore category capability, with developer remediation workflows.Continuous CLI/API evaluates configurable engineering gates over exact assessment runs. Incomplete, degraded, unknown or pending evidence refuses release. Human approvals stay separate; no automated code fixes.
SBOM generationAuthoritative, produced at build time.Specialists strongerProduces a CycloneDX inventory artifact from what it could observe - and when nothing could be derived it stays named as a draft in an “empty, requires source” state rather than shipping an empty file that looks complete.
CycloneDX / SPDX supportBroad, usually in both directions and several serialisations.CycloneDX JSON and SPDX JSON read as release evidence, retained with their own hash. XML and tag-value are refused rather than partially understood.
Known-exploitation contextCommonly included, often with proprietary exploit intelligence.CISA KEV, refreshed hourly, three-valued per CVE, with a stale or failed catalog shown as degraded rather than cleared.
Affectedness / VEXIncreasingly supported, often oriented to suppressing findings.Under investigation, affected, not affected, fixed - per release, component and vulnerability, append-only, attributed, with justification and evidence, exportable as history.
The CRA obligation - our ground
CRA legal requirement mappingRarely, and not the category's purpose. Some products publish CRA-oriented reports over findings.Requirement register against versioned rules carrying authority kind, legal effect, publisher, citation, URL, locator and retrieval date.
Source evidence provenanceFindings point at code so a developer can fix them - provenance for triage, not for a compliance file.Path, 1-based line and code-point span, commit, release, snapshot, run, hashes, collector version and redaction policy, kept so a reviewer can re-check a conclusion.
Compliance gapsNot modelled - a scanner has no concept of a missing legal obligation.A remediation register of unresolved requirements, each with an authored work type. No hour estimates, because there is no defensible basis for one.
Cybersecurity risk registerSometimes a risk view over findings, scored by the tool.A separate register from compliance gaps, holding likelihood, impact, score and residual risk as UNASSESSED until a human approves them.
Human approvalTicket and exception workflows, aimed at engineering throughput.Approval gates requiring Owner or Admin authority, appended to the exact assessment they were made against, never overwritten.
Article 14 recordsNot modelled. A scanner alert is not an awareness record.Case records with 24-hour, 72-hour and final-report clocks against a recorded awareness time, a named runbook, marked drills, and a workspace register. ConformOps never submits.
Technical documentationNot produced.Annex II working draft and an Annex-VII-oriented working record, generated from current evidence and never presented as complete technical documentation.
Declaration / Annex working recordsNot produced.An Annex-V-structured declaration draft that cannot be finalised while any conformity gate is unresolved. You issue and sign it; ConformOps never does.
Release evidence historyScan history and trend charts, usually organised by repository or asset.Point-in-time assessments per release with enriched deltas, plus on-demand comparison of any two completed runs.
AuditabilityScan logs and finding state changes.Append-only audit register with CSV export, decisions bound to assessments, and artifacts carrying hash, version and approval state.
Reviewer evidence sharingReports and dashboards, generally designed for engineers and security teams.Twice-gated reviewer share carrying counts, requirement states and cited locators - never source paths or evidence excerpts - plus an evidence workbook for people who do not read JSON.
PricingVaries by vendor - often usage, developer, asset or enterprise based. We publish no category price because there isn't one.€0 free preview · €99 once per product · €79/month or €790/year per assignable slot · €249/month or €2,490/year for five slots.
Best fitFinding, prioritising and fixing security problems in code and artifacts, continuously, with developers in the loop.Connecting engineering evidence to CRA obligations, preserving the decision chain, tracking what is missing, and producing controlled CRA work products.
On narrow screens each capability becomes a card with both answers stacked beneath it. Nothing is hidden behind a horizontal scroll.
The actual decision
Use each category for the problem it is built to solve.
Deep software composition analysis is the goal.
- You need rich vulnerability intelligence and licence analysis.
- Reachability decides what your team works on.
- Container and package scanning matter.
- You want CI gates and developer remediation in the pipeline.
The goal is connecting engineering evidence to CRA obligations.
- You need the decision and evidence chain preserved, not just current state.
- Knowing what is still missing matters as much as what is found.
- You have to produce controlled CRA work products.
- Article 14 records, human review and release evidence need to be operated.
One caution that applies to both categories
A component inventory and a CVE list are evidence for part of Annex I Part II. They are not evidence for secure defaults, update distribution, risk assessment, support period, user information, or the reporting process. Anyone telling you an SBOM covers the CRA is selling you something.
Keep the scanner
Use its build-time inventory, deep feeds, reachability, container coverage and developer workflow as the upstream security record.
Connect the obligation
Let ConformOps preserve the source, requirement, decision, reporting and controlled-document chain around the release.
Methodology
Category comparison, with sourced tool examples.
The table compares categories. The Snyk, Trivy and Dependabot sections summarise their linked public documentation, reviewed on 7 September 2026. The evidence-chain recommendations are our interpretation; they do not imply a partnership or a native integration.
Check your own tool
Depth varies enormously across this category. Some products already do things this page attributes to the category generally, and some do not.
No category price
Pricing models differ too much to summarise. We publish ours and describe theirs as varying by vendor rather than inventing a figure.
Not a replacement claim
ConformOps is not an SCA, SAST, DAST or container-scanning substitute. Where the table says “not offered”, that is a product boundary we intend to keep.
Corrections welcome
If a characterisation of the category is unfair, tell us and we will change it. Write to help@conformops.eu .
Product and company names are trademarks of their respective owners. Published for information only; nothing here is legal advice, and ConformOps does not certify products or issue declarations of conformity.
Keep the scanner. Connect it to the obligation.
Assess a product