Is Trivy alone enough?
A scanner tells you what is vulnerable on a machine right now. An audit asks a different question: how is vulnerability management run and documented across the whole company. Below is an honest comparison of three ways to answer it — including where each one, ours included, falls short.
Model and price
- Trivy alone
- Free, Apache-2.0 licence. No licence fees.
- Secvalis
- SaaS subscription. Three plans with the price stated openly on the site (from 199 PLN/month), the fourth — Enterprise — quoted individually.
- Enterprise scanners
- Prices usually undisclosed — learning the cost normally requires a sales call. Often annual contracts.
Time to deploy
- Trivy alone
- A single scan: instant. Turning it into a management system: days or weeks of engineering work.
- Secvalis
- Sign up and run one script on the machine. The script is transparent — you can read it before running it.
- Enterprise scanners
- Usually weeks: procurement, network integration, often paid professional services.
Total cost of ownership
- Trivy alone
- The licence costs nothing. The cost is the engineering hours needed to build a results database, a dashboard and notifications around the scanner — and to keep maintaining them.
- Secvalis
- The subscription plus administrator time measured in minutes per week.
- Enterprise scanners
- The licence, and often implementation and training too. Usually a barrier for smaller organisations.
Maintenance
- Trivy alone
- Entirely yours: the scanner, the databases, the scripts gluing it to the rest of the company. A changed output format in a new release can break your scripts.
- Secvalis
- The platform, the vulnerability feeds (NVD, CISA KEV, EPSS) and the parsers are on our side. On yours: one script in cron per machine. On a larger fleet that is a single Puppet or Ansible resource — updating means replacing one file.
- Enterprise scanners
- Configuring policies and components usually requires a dedicated person.
Who operates it
- Trivy alone
- An engineer who reads raw JSON and writes their own automation.
- Secvalis
- An IT administrator. Priorities (CVSS, EPSS, CISA KEV) are computed by the platform — you see what to patch first.
- Enterprise scanners
- Usually a security analyst trained on that specific platform.
Interface
- Trivy alone
- A command line and JSON files. No dashboard, no user accounts.
- Secvalis
- A web dashboard: fleet, vulnerabilities, trends, roles and permissions.
- Enterprise scanners
- An extensive dashboard. The wealth of features often comes at the cost of onboarding and learning time.
Decisions and workflow (triage)
- Trivy alone
- No concept of state. Every scan starts from scratch; muting a finding means editing a .trivyignore file on each machine separately.
- Secvalis
- Vulnerability statuses (new, in progress, fixed) plus a separate risk-acceptance path — with an owner, a justification, a deadline and compensating controls.
- Enterprise scanners
- An extensive workflow, often requiring integration with an external ticketing system.
Evidence for the auditor
- Trivy alone
- Raw JSON or SBOM files. The scanner cannot answer “what did you do about this finding three months ago”.
- Secvalis
- PDF reports for management and auditors, a complete activity log (who, what, when, with what justification) exportable to CSV and PDF, and a separate read-only auditor role.
- Enterprise scanners
- Extensive reports, sometimes too technical for a non-technical reader.
Polish NIS2 act, NIS2, ISO 27001
- Trivy alone
- Finds the flaws, but does not map them to requirements and produces no compliance evidence.
- Secvalis
- Built for the Polish national cybersecurity act, NIS2 and ISO 27001 (A.8.8): control mapping, the statutory timeline and an audit evidence pack.
- Enterprise scanners
- Compliance usually mapped to international standards; the Polish act is rarely addressed directly.
Notifications
- Trivy alone
- To be scripted yourself.
- Secvalis
- Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Telegram, webhooks and e-mail digests — out of the box.
- Enterprise scanners
- Broad capabilities; connectors are sometimes licensed separately.
Server footprint
- Trivy alone
- Run on demand, nothing runs in the background.
- Secvalis
- Agentless: a cron script runs the scan, sends the results and exits. No permanent process.
- Enterprise scanners
- Usually require installing an agent that runs in the background.
Data and GDPR
- Trivy alone
- Results stay local — but there is no central view of the whole infrastructure.
- Secvalis
- Hosted at OVHcloud in Warsaw (Poland, EEA). The scan runs locally; only result metadata reaches the platform — hostname, packages, versions and matched CVEs. Never files, passwords, configuration or source code. The data processing agreement (DPA) is concluded electronically.
- Enterprise scanners
- Data often lands in clouds outside the EEA, which can be a problem for essential entities.
What is missing
- Trivy alone
- A dashboard, history, roles and evidence. You must build and maintain all of it yourself.
- Secvalis
- We do not support Windows Server yet (it is on the roadmap) nor fully air-gapped networks — the script needs outbound HTTPS. We are a young product.
- Enterprise scanners
- Pricing transparency and flexibility for smaller organisations.
When Trivy alone is enough
If you run a handful of machines, nobody asks you for evidence, and you are comfortable reading JSON — Trivy alone is the right tool, and you do not need us. The same is true when you already have an engineering team that has built its own aggregation and reporting around a scanner and is happy to keep maintaining it.
Secvalis starts to pay off when someone asks for proof — an auditor, a client, a regulator — or when the fleet grows past what one person can hold in their head.
What about open-source vulnerability management platforms?
Projects such as DefectDojo do give you the process layer a bare scanner lacks, and they cost nothing to license. They are an excellent choice when you have a team able to run them: the price is your team's time — installation, upgrades, backups, availability, and the security of the platform itself. There is also no vendor to call when something breaks, and no support commitment behind it.
The question is not which software is better, but who you want to spend that time: your engineers, or ours.
Do the math yourself
We will not quote you a number for what a scanner-plus-scripts setup costs, because we do not know your rates. Here is the formula and our assumptions — substitute your own:
cost = engineer hours x hourly rate + monthly upkeep hours x 12 x hourly rate
Our assumption: roughly 40 hours to build result aggregation, a database, notifications and a usable view on top of a scanner, plus a few hours a month to keep it alive as formats and requirements change. This is an estimate, not a measurement — your numbers may be lower, and if they are, that is a real argument for doing it yourself.
Trivy is an open-source project by Aqua Security, distributed under the Apache-2.0 licence. Secvalis runs Trivy under the hood — we compare a scanner with a process built on top of it, not one scanner against another.
The “enterprise scanners” column describes a category, not any single product. Commercial offerings differ, so every claim about them is deliberately qualified. Verify against the vendor you are actually considering.
Curious what exactly leaves your machine? We list every transmitted field on the data transparency page.
Still deciding? Look at the evidence a real audit needs — no sign-up required.