CppDepend vs Flawfinder
CppDepend
cppdepend.com
Flawfinder
dwheeler.comSide by side
| Figure | CppDepend | Flawfinder |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · C and C++ Static Analysis Tools | 8.3 (#7) | 8.1 (#9) |
| Intended users | The site describes use by developers, software architects, tech leads, engineering managers, QA and security teams, compliance teams, consultants, and M&A due-diligence teams. | The site presents Flawfinder as an aid for developers seeking to find potential security problems in C/C++ application source before release, and cautions that it does not replace security knowledge or human review. |
| Purpose | CppDepend analyzes C, C++, Java, and Rust codebases to visualize architecture, detect issues, enforce coding standards, and prevent technical debt. | Flawfinder examines C/C++ source code and reports possible security weaknesses sorted by risk level. |
| Support | Support during the subscription period covers installation and usage problems, general questions, and bug fixes. | The project directs general questions to its mailing list and specific bugs or feature requests to git or the issue tracker on SourceForge. |
Plans
In their own words
Flawfinder
Flawfinder is a free tool for finding possible security weaknesses in C and C++ source code. It compares source text with a built-in database of functions associated with security problems, generally disregarding comments and strings except for Flawfinder directives. Findings are ordered by risk, which depends on the function and its parameter values; the tool may reduce some false positives when it identifies a construct as not risky. Reports can be generated as text, HTML, CSV, or SARIF. The --patch option narrows findings to changed lines in a unified diff, with a one-line margin. Installation is documented through pip, source downloads, and distribution packages, and the tool requires Python 2.7 or Python 3. The project says it works on Unix-like systems, including GNU/Linux, and on Windows with Cygwin; direct Windows use has also been reported to work. Flawfinder is released under GPL-2.0+. It does not perform control-flow or data-flow analysis, so its output is an aid to review rather than a substitute for security knowledge or human judgment.