Dependabot vs Renovate

Quick Verdict

Dependabot is the right default for GitHub-only teams that want dependency updates with minimal setup. It’s built into GitHub, free with no limits, and covers 30+ ecosystems. Enable it in repository settings, add a YAML config file, and you’re done. Renovate is the tool to reach for when you need more control — 90+ package managers, multi-platform support (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, Gitea), regex managers for non-standard files, advanced scheduling, and merge confidence scoring. The configuration is more complex, but that complexity buys you flexibility that Dependabot cannot match.

Feature Comparison

Dependabot vs Renovate: Head-to-Head

Setup and Onboarding

Dependabot wins on simplicity. Go to your GitHub repository settings, enable Dependabot alerts and security updates, and you’re already getting vulnerability notifications and automatic fix PRs. For version updates, add a .github/dependabot.yml file specifying which ecosystems to track and the update schedule. No external services, no API tokens, no installation step. It’s already there.

Renovate requires an installation step, but it’s still straightforward. Install the Mend-hosted Renovate GitHub App, select your repositories, and Renovate creates an onboarding PR. That PR shows you exactly what Renovate detected in your repository, what it plans to update, and lets you customize the configuration before merging. The onboarding PR is a nice touch — it gives you a preview of what Renovate will do before it starts opening update PRs.

For GitLab, Bitbucket, or Azure DevOps, you run Renovate as a self-hosted service or CI job. That adds operational overhead compared to Dependabot’s zero-setup model, but it’s the only option since Dependabot doesn’t work outside GitHub.

Package Manager Coverage

Renovate’s coverage is broader by a wide margin. With 90+ package managers, it handles everything Dependabot covers plus many more: Poetry, Pipenv, uv, sbt, CocoaPods, Bower, Docker Compose, Kubernetes manifests, Helm charts, CircleCI config files, and dozens of others. The regex manager feature lets you define custom patterns to update version strings in any file — Dockerfiles, Makefiles, CI configs, or anything else with a version number.

Dependabot covers 30+ ecosystems: npm, pip, Maven, Gradle, Bundler, Cargo, Composer, NuGet, Go modules, Docker, Terraform, GitHub Actions, pnpm, Bun, Helm, Swift, Pub, uv, and more. For the most common languages and frameworks, 30 ecosystems is enough. You hit the limits when dealing with less mainstream package managers or when you need to update versions in non-standard file locations.

The practical question is whether your stack includes anything outside Dependabot’s supported list. If it does, Renovate is your only choice among these two.

Grouping and PR Management

Both tools group related updates to reduce PR noise, but they approach it differently.

Dependabot groups updates by dependency name patterns, dependency type (production vs. development), semver update level, and even across ecosystems. Cross-ecosystem grouping — bundling npm, pip, and Docker updates into one PR — became generally available in mid-2025. You define groups in dependabot.yml and Dependabot bundles matching updates together.

Renovate groups updates through packageRules in renovate.json. You can group by package name regex, update type, source URL, or any combination. Renovate’s grouping is more granular — you can create groups like “all AWS SDK packages” or “all linting tools” with regex patterns that Dependabot’s simpler matching can’t express. Renovate also supports matchManagers, letting you group by package manager type.

PR limits work differently too. Dependabot lets you set open-pull-requests-limit per ecosystem (default 5). Renovate has both prHourlyLimit and prConcurrentLimit, giving finer control over how many PRs get created and when. For repositories with many dependencies, Renovate’s rate limiting prevents the flood of PRs that Dependabot can create when first enabled.

Automerge

Dependabot doesn’t have built-in automerge. You set it up through a GitHub Actions workflow that uses dependabot/fetch-metadata to check the update type and then runs gh pr merge --auto for low-risk updates. It works, but it’s a separate workflow you have to write and maintain.

Renovate has automerge built in. Set "automerge": true in a package rule and Renovate handles the rest. You can automerge by update type (patch, minor), by package name, by whether tests pass, and with configurable delays. Renovate even supports branch automerge (merging without creating a PR at all) for low-risk updates, which further reduces noise.

For teams that want to keep dependencies current with minimal manual intervention, Renovate’s native automerge is more convenient.

Configuration Sharing

Renovate has a preset system that lets you share configuration across an organization. Create a shared config repository with your organization’s dependency update policies, and individual repositories extend it with "extends": ["github>your-org/renovate-config"]. Changes to the shared config propagate to all repositories automatically. For large organizations with dozens or hundreds of repositories, this saves real time.

Dependabot has no equivalent. Each repository gets its own dependabot.yml, and there’s no mechanism to share or inherit configuration. For organizations with many repositories, this means duplicating configuration and updating it repository by repository.

Vulnerability Handling

Dependabot pulls from the GitHub Advisory Database, which contains 28,000+ reviewed advisories. Only advisories reviewed by GitHub’s security team trigger alerts, which reduces false positives compared to raw NVD feeds. Security update PRs bump to the minimum patched version (not latest) to minimize breaking changes, and include compatibility scores based on public CI pass rates.

Renovate uses upstream vulnerability databases (OSV, GitHub Advisories) and creates immediate PRs that bypass normal scheduling when a CVE is published. The PR includes vulnerability details and severity ratings. Mend’s commercial offering adds merge confidence scores from aggregated CI data across millions of updates, which helps assess the risk of applying a specific update.

Neither tool does reachability analysis to determine whether your code actually calls the vulnerable function. For that capability, you’d pair either tool with a dedicated SCA scanner like Snyk Open Source.

When to Choose Dependabot

Choose Dependabot if:

• Your repositories are all on GitHub and you want the simplest possible setup
• The 30+ supported ecosystems cover your stack
• You prefer zero-setup security alerts that work out of the box
• Your dependency update needs are straightforward (weekly updates, basic grouping)
• You don’t need to share configuration across many repositories
• You want compatibility scores based on public CI data

When to Choose Renovate

Choose Renovate if:

• You have repositories on GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, or Gitea in addition to (or instead of) GitHub
• You need 90+ package managers or regex managers for non-standard files
• Built-in automerge without writing separate GitHub Actions workflows matters to you
• You manage many repositories and want shared configuration presets
• Your monorepo setup requires workspace-aware dependency updates
• You need more granular control over scheduling, PR limits, and grouping rules

Both tools are free. Most teams start with Dependabot because it’s already in GitHub and requires no decisions. When they outgrow Dependabot’s configuration options or need multi-platform support, they migrate to Renovate. The migration is well-documented since Renovate can read and convert existing Dependabot configuration.

For more SCA tools, see our full category comparison.

Frequently Asked Questions

Written by

Suphi Cankurt

Suphi Cankurt is an application security enthusiast based in Helsinki, Finland. He reviews and compares 129 AppSec tools across 10 categories on AppSec Santa. Learn more.