Is Syft or WorkOS better?

Neither clearly leads. Syft starts at Free and WorkOS at $125/one-time per connection, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.

Which is cheaper, Syft or WorkOS?

Syft has a free tier; the other does not. Paid plans start at Free for Syft and $125/one-time per connection for WorkOS.

Does Syft or WorkOS run on more platforms?

Syft runs on macOS, Linux, Windows, Docker. WorkOS runs on Web, API.

Can I use Syft for free?

Yes. Syft has a free tier, so you can try it without paying. WorkOS starts at $125/one-time per connection.

What is Syft best used for?

Syft is most often used for producing a bill of materials for a customer or regulator that requires one, feeding an inventory into a vulnerability scanner rather than scanning images directly, recording what shipped in a build so a future disclosure can be answered quickly, public sector work where an sbom is a contractual deliverable. Of those, producing a bill of materials for a customer or regulator that requires one and feeding an inventory into a vulnerability scanner rather than scanning images directly are not what WorkOS is typically brought in for.

What can Syft do that WorkOS cannot?

Syft covers Multi-format output, Broad ecosystem coverage, Binary classifiers, In-toto attestations.

Cybersecurity · head to head

Syft vs WorkOS

Syft

Cybersecurity

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

From: Free
Rated: -

Full review Website

WorkOS

Cybersecurity

Developer platform for enterprise-ready authentication and identity.

From: $125/one-time per connection
Rated: -

Full review Website

The short version

Only Syft has a free tier, so it costs nothing to try first.
Each has a real cost: 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.; WorkOS authKit free tier limited to 1 million monthly active users; additional millions cost $2,500/month
Prices and features above were last checked on 31 August 2026.

Where they differ

Only the attributes on which Syft and WorkOS actually diverge.

Attributes where Syft and WorkOS differ
Attribute	Syft	WorkOS
Starting price	Free	$125/one-time per connection
Pricing model	Open source, no licence fee	usage-based
Free tier	Yes	No
Platforms	macOS, Linux, Windows, Docker	Web, API

Identical on both: user rating (Not yet rated), category (Cybersecurity).

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 Syft

Multi-format output
Broad ecosystem coverage
Binary classifiers
In-toto attestations
Library and CLI
Pairs with Grype

Only in WorkOS

Nothing recorded that Syft does not also cover.

What people use each for

The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.

Syft

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

WorkOS

SaaS applications needing rapid enterprise SSO deploymentnot Syft
Companies selling to mid-market and enterprise customersnot Syft
Applications requiring SCIM directory sync with corporate identity systemsnot Syft
Product teams needing audit logs for compliance (SOC 2, ISO 27001)not Syft
Platforms with multiple identity provider requirementsnot Syft

Where each one falls short

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

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.

WorkOS

AuthKit free tier limited to 1 million monthly active users; additional millions cost $2,500/month
Per-connection pricing for SSO and Directory Sync ($125–$50 each) scales poorly for enterprises with many identity providers
Audit logs require separate subscription at $125/month per SIEM connection or $99/month per 1 million events
Radar fraud protection billed separately at $100/month per 50,000 additional checks beyond 1,000 free checks
Custom domain feature requires $99/month subscription
Requires annual commitment for SLA and support guarantees; pay-as-you-go tier lacks uptime guarantee

Pricing, plan by plan

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

WorkOS

$125/one-time per connection

Pay as You Go$undefined/variable
- Per-connection pricing from $125 to $50 with volume discounts
- Up to 60% discount at scale
- Quick deployment
Annual Credits$undefined/variable
- Custom pricing with volume discounts
- 99.99% uptime SLA
- Guided migration

Which should you pick?

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

Choose WorkOS if

You work on Web, API.

WorkOS review

Questions people ask

Is Syft or WorkOS better?: Neither clearly leads. Syft starts at Free and WorkOS at $125/one-time per connection, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
Which is cheaper, Syft or WorkOS?: Syft has a free tier; the other does not. Paid plans start at Free for Syft and $125/one-time per connection for WorkOS.
Does Syft or WorkOS run on more platforms?: Syft runs on macOS, Linux, Windows, Docker. WorkOS runs on Web, API.
Can I use Syft for free?: Yes. Syft has a free tier, so you can try it without paying. WorkOS starts at $125/one-time per connection.
What is Syft best used for?: Syft is most often used for producing a bill of materials for a customer or regulator that requires one, feeding an inventory into a vulnerability scanner rather than scanning images directly, recording what shipped in a build so a future disclosure can be answered quickly, public sector work where an sbom is a contractual deliverable. Of those, producing a bill of materials for a customer or regulator that requires one and feeding an inventory into a vulnerability scanner rather than scanning images directly are not what WorkOS is typically brought in for.
What can Syft do that WorkOS cannot?: 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.

WorkOS: How quickly can I implement WorkOS SSO?

Developers can implement single sign-on in minutes instead of months. Multiple customers report setting up SSO in less than a week, with WorkOS handling the complexity of SAML and OIDC protocols.

Source

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.

WorkOS: What SDKs does WorkOS provide?

WorkOS offers SDKs for Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, PHP, Java, and .NET.

Source

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.

WorkOS: Does WorkOS support SCIM provisioning?

Yes. WorkOS supports SCIM provisioning integration with systems like Okta and Entra ID for automated user management.

Source

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.

Syft vs WorkOS

Syft

WorkOS

The short version

Where they differ

What each one covers

Only in Syft

Only in WorkOS

What people use each for

Syft

WorkOS

Where each one falls short

Syft

WorkOS

Pricing, plan by plan

Syft

WorkOS

Which should you pick?

Choose Syft if

Choose WorkOS if

Questions people ask

Answered from the vendors’ own pages

Related pages

More on Syft

More on WorkOS

Keep looking

Other head to heads