Question 1

Should I stop using my ecosystem's native scanner if I use GeekWala?

Accepted Answer

No. Keep npm audit, pip-audit, govulncheck, etc. in your CI pipeline. They're fast, free, and catch issues at development time. GeekWala adds the prioritization layer — use it to decide which findings from your native scanner deserve immediate attention vs. next sprint vs. accepted risk.

Question 2

Why don't the native scanners include EPSS?

Accepted Answer

EPSS is maintained by FIRST.org and updated daily for 200,000+ CVEs. Integrating it requires fetching, caching, and correlating EPSS data with each scanner's advisory database. The native tools are focused on their ecosystem's advisory data and keep dependencies minimal. Adding EPSS would increase complexity and require network calls that conflict with some tools' offline-first design.

Question 3

Is OWASP Dependency-Check really multi-ecosystem?

Accepted Answer

Technically yes — it can scan npm, Python, .NET, Ruby, and more via its various analyzers. In practice, its NVD-based CPE matching works best for Java/Maven artifacts. For other ecosystems, the false positive rate is high enough that teams usually prefer the native tool. Java shops love it. Everyone else finds it noisy.

Question 4

What about Trivy, Grype, or other container-focused scanners?

Accepted Answer

Trivy (Aqua Security) and Grype (Anchore) are excellent tools that scan container images, filesystems, and git repositories. They pull from multiple advisory databases and support many ecosystems. They're closer to Snyk in scope — broader than dependency scanning alone. Grype now includes native EPSS and CISA KEV enrichment, which is a genuine strength — see our GeekWala vs Grype comparison for a fair head-to-head. If you're already using Trivy or Grype for container scanning, you could use them for SCA too. GeekWala adds a web dashboard, scan history, and team visibility on top of exploitation signals.

Question 5

How often should I scan?

Accepted Answer

At minimum: every CI build (using the native scanner) and weekly (using GeekWala or your cross-ecosystem tool of choice). EPSS scores change daily as new exploit data emerges — a finding that was EPSS 0.1 last week could spike to 0.8 this week. Scheduled GeekWala scans catch these score changes between deploys.