Softwr

Government · head to head

NEOGOV vs Syft

NEOGOV logo

NEOGOV

Government

Public sector HR suite covering civil service recruiting, onboarding, training and policy management

From
On request
Free plan
No
Full reviewWebsite
Syft logo

Syft

Cybersecurity

Generates a software bill of materials from images, filesystems and archives

From
Free
Free plan
Yes
Full reviewWebsite

The short version

  • Only Syft has a free tier, so it costs nothing to try first.
  • Each has a real cost: NEOGOV each module is shallower than the specialist product it competes with, so agencies buying the full suite for coherence accept weaker performance management and learning than they would get separately.; 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: NEOGOV covers Civil service recruiting, Syft covers Multi-format output.
  • Prices and features above were last checked on 31 August 2026.

Where they differ

Only the attributes on which NEOGOV and Syft actually diverge.

Attributes where NEOGOV and Syft differ
AttributeNEOGOVSyft
Starting priceOn requestFree
Pricing modelquoteOpen source, no licence fee
Free tierNoYes
PlatformsWeb, iOS, AndroidmacOS, Linux, Windows, Docker
CategoryGovernmentCybersecurity

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 NEOGOV

  • Civil service recruiting
  • Veterans preference handling
  • GovernmentJobs.com posting
  • Onboarding workflows
  • Learning and training records
  • Policy management

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.

NEOGOV

  • A city or county HR department that must run scored examinations and ranked eligibility listsnot Syft
  • A public safety agency needing policy acknowledgement records that stand up in litigationnot Syft
  • An agency replacing a commercial applicant tracking system that cannot handle veterans preferencenot Syft
  • A school district or university consolidating recruiting, onboarding and mandated training recordsnot Syft

Syft

  • Producing a bill of materials for a customer or regulator that requires onenot NEOGOV
  • Feeding an inventory into a vulnerability scanner rather than scanning images directlynot NEOGOV
  • Recording what shipped in a build so a future disclosure can be answered quicklynot NEOGOV
  • Public sector work where an SBOM is a contractual deliverablenot NEOGOV

Where each one falls short

Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.

NEOGOV

  • Each module is shallower than the specialist product it competes with, so agencies buying the full suite for coherence accept weaker performance management and learning than they would get separately.
  • Policy management arrived through the PowerDMS acquisition rather than being built in, and the join between it and the rest of the suite still reads as two products.
  • Implementation is long and configuration heavy because the civil service rules that make the product valuable have to be encoded for your jurisdiction, and that work is billed.
  • Pricing is not published and scales with headcount, so a large agency can pay several times what a comparable one pays without knowing it unless someone reads the public contracts.
  • Private equity ownership since the Warburg Pincus investment has coincided with an acquisition led strategy, and buyers should expect further products bolted on rather than deeper integration of the existing ones.

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

NEOGOV

On request
  • NEOGOV Suite$undefined/year
    • Quoted per module and scaled by employee headcount
    • Implementation and data migration priced separately from the subscription
    • Available through cooperative purchasing and state term contracts

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 NEOGOV if

  • You need civil service recruiting.
  • You work on Web, iOS, Android.
  • You also want veterans preference handling.
NEOGOV review

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.
Syft review

Questions people ask

Is NEOGOV or Syft better?
Neither clearly leads. NEOGOV starts at On request and Syft at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
Which is cheaper, NEOGOV or Syft?
Syft has a free tier; the other does not. Paid plans start at On request for NEOGOV and Free for Syft.
Does NEOGOV or Syft run on more platforms?
NEOGOV runs on Web, iOS, Android. 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. NEOGOV starts at On request.
What is NEOGOV best used for?
NEOGOV is most often used for a city or county hr department that must run scored examinations and ranked eligibility lists, a public safety agency needing policy acknowledgement records that stand up in litigation, an agency replacing a commercial applicant tracking system that cannot handle veterans preference, a school district or university consolidating recruiting, onboarding and mandated training records. Of those, a city or county hr department that must run scored examinations and ranked eligibility lists and a public safety agency needing policy acknowledgement records that stand up in litigation are not what Syft is typically brought in for.
What can NEOGOV do that Syft cannot?
NEOGOV covers Civil service recruiting, Veterans preference handling, GovernmentJobs.com posting, Onboarding workflows. Syft covers Multi-format output, Broad ecosystem coverage, Binary classifiers, In-toto attestations.

Answered from the vendors’ own pages

NEOGOV: Why not use a commercial applicant tracking system?

Because civil service rules such as ranked eligibility lists, rule of three certification and veterans preference are not expressible in commercial products, so the statutory steps end up in spreadsheets.

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.

NEOGOV: Can I find out what other agencies pay?

Yes. These are public procurements, so executed contract values appear in council agenda packets and state term contract listings. Read several before negotiating.

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.

NEOGOV: What did NEOGOV acquire?

PowerDMS, a policy management and accreditation product, in 2021, which is now sold as the policy module of the suite.

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.

NEOGOV: Is it only for the United States?

Effectively yes. The value is in encoding US civil service and public safety requirements.

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.

Share

Related pages

More on NEOGOV

More on Syft

Keep looking

Other head to heads