gosec vs Joern
gosec
github.com
Joern
joern.ioSide by side
| Figure | gosec | Joern |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 0 |
| Spec score · Static Application Security Testing Sast | 8.6 (#3) | 7.6 (#13) |
| Spec score · SAST Tools | 8.6 (#4) | 7.7 (#16) |
| Spec score · Static Analysis Tools | 8.6 (#7) | 7.7 (#19) |
| Community | The Secure Go site links to project guidelines, tools, a community Slack, Stack Overflow, and a blog. | The official site links to a Joern community Discord. |
| License | The repository states that gosec is licensed under Apache License 2.0. | The repository identifies Joern as open source and includes an Apache-2.0 license. |
| Purpose | gosec inspects Go source code for security problems by scanning its AST and SSA code representation. | Joern analyzes source code, bytecode, and binary executables to support vulnerability discovery and static program analysis. |
| Requirements | The local installation instructions require Go 1.25 or newer. | The repository lists JDK 21 as a requirement and says other versions may work but have not been properly tested. |
Plans
In their own words
gosec
gosec is a free Go source-code security checker that analyzes abstract syntax trees and static single assignment representations. It applies pattern rules, SSA analyzers, and taint analysis to detect issues including injection, path traversal, SSRF, unsafe deserialization, cryptography and TLS problems, blocklisted imports, and Go-specific risks. Findings map to Common Weakness Enumeration entries. Users can select or exclude rules, define path-based exclusions, and change settings such as audit mode. Reports are available as text, JSON, YAML, CSV, JUnit XML, HTML, SonarQube, golint, and SARIF. The project documents GitHub Actions and SARIF uploads to GitHub code scanning; its goanalysis package supports tools such as Bazel nogo. Local installation requires Go 1.25 or newer, with dependencies loaded through Go modules. An optional AI feature suggests fixes through Atlas Cloud, Gemini, Claude, OpenAI, or custom OpenAI-compatible APIs. Automated detection can produce false positives, which annotations can suppress. It is licensed under Apache License 2.0.
Joern
Joern analyzes source code, bytecode and binary code for vulnerability discovery and static program analysis research. It converts programs into code property graphs, providing a common structure for cross-language analysis. Users query those graphs with a strongly typed, extensible Scala-based domain-specific language. Features include parsing, taint analysis, search queries and passes that extend the graph representation. Joern Scan runs predefined queries and reports matching issues with their locations; queries can be selected by tag or name, and community contributions are accepted in the default database. Queries can be wrapped into custom scanners for CI. Joern also works as a library or through REST and HTTP APIs, including a server for graph construction and querying. Documented frontends cover C, C++, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, Kotlin, PHP, Python, Ruby, Swift, x86/x64 and JVM bytecode, with varying maturity. Distributions target Linux, macOS and Windows on x86_64 and ARM64. Joern is free, Apache-2.0 licensed and requires JDK 21.