Government · head to head
Incode vs Syft

Syft
Cybersecurity
Generates a software bill of materials from images, filesystems and archives
- From
- Free
- Free plan
- Yes
The short version
- Only Syft has a free tier, so it costs nothing to try first.
- Each has a real cost: Incode incode is now sold as Tyler ERP Pro and tylertech.com/products/incode redirects to the ERP Pro product page; Syft lockfile parsing can drop packages silently. An open issue filed in August 2026 reports the yarn v1 cataloguer returning 118 of 745 packages with no error raised, which means a complete bill of materials and an 84 percent incomplete one look identical to the caller.
- They diverge on capability: Incode covers General Ledger, Syft covers Multi-format output.
- Prices and features above were last checked on 31 August 2026.
Where they differ
Only the attributes on which Incode and Syft actually diverge.
Identical on both: user rating (Not yet rated).
What each one covers
Drawn from each product's published feature list. An absence here means we hold no record of it - not that the product lacks it.
Only in Incode
- General Ledger
- Accounts Payable
- Payroll Management
- Utility Billing
- Budget Management
- Bank Integrations
- ADP
- Third-party Payroll
Only in Syft
- Multi-format output
- Broad ecosystem coverage
- Binary classifiers
- In-toto attestations
- Library and CLI
- Pairs with Grype
What people use each for
The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.
Incode
- Financial management and ERP for small and mid-sized local governmentsnot Syft
- Utility billing, payroll and human resources for city and county administrationnot Syft
- Court and public safety records for municipalitiesnot Syft
Syft
- Producing a bill of materials for a customer or regulator that requires onenot Incode
- Feeding an inventory into a vulnerability scanner rather than scanning images directlynot Incode
- Recording what shipped in a build so a future disclosure can be answered quicklynot Incode
- Public sector work where an SBOM is a contractual deliverablenot Incode
Where each one falls short
Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.
Incode
- Incode is now sold as Tyler ERP Pro and tylertech.com/products/incode redirects to the ERP Pro product page
- No pricing is published; Tyler routes all enquiries through contact and demo requests with no published rate, minimum or cost driver
- The product is sold only to public sector organisations
Syft
- Lockfile parsing can drop packages silently. An open issue filed in August 2026 reports the yarn v1 cataloguer returning 118 of 745 packages with no error raised, which means a complete bill of materials and an 84 percent incomplete one look identical to the caller.
- Fidelity varies sharply by ecosystem. Conan for C and C++, Haskell and Terraform get cataloguer support with no licence data, no dependency relationships and no file ownership, so a C and C++ shop gets the least from it.
- Binary classification yields no licence or dependency metadata, and vendored or statically linked code is exactly where supply chain risk hides, so the blind spot and the risk overlap.
- Incorrect CPE values and CPE collisions are recorded as open issues, and since Grype matches on CPE and PURL, an inventory error becomes a false negative in the security report downstream.
- An inventory is not a risk assessment. Even a perfect bill of materials says a vulnerable version is present, never that the vulnerable function is called, and the triage burden lands entirely on the reader.
Pricing, plan by plan
Incode
$700/month- Municipal Suite$700/month
- Financial Management
- HR/Payroll
- Utility Billing
Syft
Free- SyftFree
- Apache-2.0
- No usage limits
- Community support
- Anchore Enterprise$undefined/year
- Policy enforcement and reporting
- Federal and commercial tiers
- Pricing not published, quoted on request
Which should you pick?
Choose Incode if
- You need general ledger.
- You work on Web, Desktop.
- You also want accounts payable.
Choose Syft if
- You need multi-format output.
- You want to start without paying.
- You work on macOS, Linux, Windows, Docker.
- You also want broad ecosystem coverage.
Questions people ask
- Is Incode or Syft better?
- Neither clearly leads. Incode starts at $700/month and Syft at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
- Which is cheaper, Incode or Syft?
- Syft has a free tier; the other does not. Paid plans start at $700/month for Incode and Free for Syft.
- Does Incode or Syft run on more platforms?
- Incode runs on Web, Desktop. Syft runs on macOS, Linux, Windows, Docker.
- Can I use Syft for free?
- Yes. Syft has a free tier, so you can try it without paying. Incode starts at $700/month.
- What is Incode best used for?
- Incode is most often used for financial management and erp for small and mid-sized local governments, utility billing, payroll and human resources for city and county administration, court and public safety records for municipalities. Of those, financial management and erp for small and mid-sized local governments and utility billing, payroll and human resources for city and county administration are not what Syft is typically brought in for.
- What can Incode do that Syft cannot?
- Incode covers General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Payroll Management, Utility Billing. Syft covers Multi-format output, Broad ecosystem coverage, Binary classifiers, In-toto attestations.
Answered from the vendors’ own pages
Syft: Does Syft find vulnerabilities?
No. It produces an inventory. Grype, from the same company, matches that inventory against vulnerability feeds. They are separate tools and the distinction is frequently lost.
Syft: Does anything in the Anchore stack do reachability analysis?
No. Neither Syft, Grype nor the commercial Anchore platform performs call graph or reachability analysis, so none of them tells you whether a vulnerable code path is actually invoked.
Syft: Is it a CNCF or OpenSSF project?
No. It is single-vendor open source owned by Anchore, with no foundation governance. That is a different licence risk profile from Sigstore.
Syft: What does Anchore Enterprise cost?
Not published. The pricing page is contact-sales only, with named but unpriced commercial and federal tiers.
Syft: How do I know my SBOM is complete?
You largely cannot, which is the honest answer. Silent partial parsing is a known open defect, so a bill of materials used for compliance should be spot-checked against a known dependency list.
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- Syft vs Cosign
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- Syft vs Trivy
- Syft vs Chainguard
- Syft vs Metasploit
- Syft vs Wireshark
- Syft vs Semgrep
- Syft vs Legit Security
- Syft vs OWASP ZAP
- Syft vs HashiCorp Vault
- Syft vs Bitwarden
- Syft vs Infisical
- Syft vs Tenable Nessus
- Syft vs Transmit Security
- Syft vs TrustArc
- Syft vs Varonis Data Security Platform
- Syft vs VMware Carbon Black

