What does Snyk do?
Snyk helps developers make sure that the code they're writing is secure.
Last updated: March 3, 2025
The TL;DR
Snyk helps developers make sure that the code they’re writing is secure and free of vulnerabilities.
- A code vulnerability is when code has some sort of weakness that a hacker could potentially exploit
- Snyk helps developers find and fix these code vulnerabilities
- You can use Snyk for your app code, your containers, your infrastructure code, and your open source libraries
- Snyk has a curiously large number of ways to use it, from API to CLI to CI
Though it’s a private company, Snyk is big – they were last valued at upwards of $7B. But before we can explain what Snyk really does, we need to understand what a vulnerability actually is, and why one might want to avoid it.
Companies Mentioned
The core Snyk product: a vulnerability copilot
Snyk helps developers find vulnerabilities in their code, fix them, and keep track of how things are trending long term. You can think of it as a little code assistant that tells you when code you’ve written isn’t secure and might lead to getting hacked.
You can use Snyk through an unusual number of different acronyms – via CLI, API, UI, CI, and IDE. Let’s look at the IDE experience. A developer writes code in an IDE like Visual Studio Code, and installs Snyk as an extension – it’s the little doberman icon on the left. Once you run an analysis on a particular project, it shows you all the vulnerabilities, how bad they are, and where they’re at.
For each vulnerability, you get a view of what’s wrong with it, and most importantly, suggestions for fixing it. Snyk pulls these suggestions from other projects (open source ones) that have fixed this same vulnerability. As of recently, you can even have Snyk auto-fix things using AI (oooh, aaah).
What is a vulnerability, exactly?
The word “vulnerability” feels like one of those software engineering terms that I heard 100 times before actually understanding what it meant. I knew it had something to do with security, and I knew it was bad. But what is a vulnerability,...