Documentation
Accuracy, speed and cost
How often Supercov finds real vulnerabilities, how fast, and what it costs, next to ten other scanners.
We ran npx supercov security on 72 repositories with known, labelled
vulnerabilities and scored it next to ten other scanners on the same code.
In short: Supercov finds 56% of the labelled vulnerabilities in a median of 10 seconds, for about 5 cents a repository. The strongest AI agents find about 80%, but take 5 to 9 minutes and cost about $4.
Results
72 repositories from RealVuln, 2,016 labelled vulnerabilities, scored with the benchmark’s own rule.
| Scanner | F1 | Precision | Recall | Median time | Cost per repository |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Codex CLI, GPT Daybreak Blue | 0.71 | 63% | 82% | 5.4 min | $3.78 |
| Codex CLI, GPT-5.6 Sol | 0.70 | 62% | 79% | 8.8 min | $3.87 |
| Kolega DevSec Max 0.1.0 | 0.69 | 56% | 91% | not recorded | not recorded |
| DeepSeek V4.1 Flash agent | 0.51 | 53% | 50% | 1.6 min | not recorded |
| GLM-5.3 agent | 0.51 | 48% | 54% | 7.9 min | 74¢ |
| Claude Code, Sonnet 5 | 0.49 | 57% | 44% | 2.8 min | 95¢ |
| Codex CLI, GPT-6 Astra | 0.49 | 45% | 54% | 6.4 min | $6.99 |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash agent | 0.48 | 59% | 41% | 2.6 min | 2¢ |
| DeepSeek V4 Pro agent | 0.46 | 63% | 37% | 3.8 min | 7¢ |
| Supercov 2.0.1 | 0.41 | 33% | 56% | 10 s | 5¢ |
| Semgrep, auto rules | 0.11 | 14% | 9% | 8 s | free |
- Recall is the share of labelled vulnerabilities a scanner found.
- Precision is the share of its findings that were real.
- F1 combines the two into one number.
Supercov is the fastest AI-based scanner by a wide margin, and one of the cheapest. Only Semgrep, which matches rules instead, is faster. It finds more than every scanner here except the two strongest Codex CLI agents and Kolega. A third of its findings are real, so its F1 is the lowest of the AI-based scanners.
What it finds, and what it misses
| Vulnerability | Found |
|---|---|
| Open redirect, server-side request forgery | 94% |
| Unsafe code execution | 88% |
| SQL, command and other injection | 86% |
| Path traversal | 82% |
| Hard-coded secrets | 79% |
| Mass assignment | 72% |
| Cross-site scripting | 68% |
| Weak authentication | 57% |
| Insecure configuration | 55% |
| Sensitive data exposure | 54% |
| Weak cryptography | 52% |
| Missing authorization | 31% |
It is best at problems visible on one line: a query built from user input, a path taken from a request. Missing authorization is its weakest area: the check that should protect a route usually lives in another file, so Supercov often flags the whole file rather than a line. 269 of the labels are kinds Supercov does not check for at all, such as missing rate limits.
It also reports the most false positives on the benchmark’s decoy findings: 26, against 1 to 23 for the others.
By language
| Language | Repositories | Supercov F1 | Best F1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Python | 32 | 0.54 | 0.82 |
| TypeScript | 27 | 0.36 | 0.65 |
| JavaScript | 13 | 0.34 | 0.74 |
Python is its strongest language. On JavaScript, many of its false positives are in bundled third-party libraries, such as copies of jQuery or Bootstrap, that it should skip.
When to use something else
- You want the most findings and can wait. A Codex CLI agent or Kolega finds 80 to 90%. Run it before a release, not on every change.
- You want low cost and can wait a few minutes. A DeepSeek V4 Flash agent is cheaper and more accurate, at about 2.6 minutes a repository.
- You want fast feedback on every change. Supercov answers in seconds, so
your agent can run it after each edit with
npx supercov security patch.
The tools also combine well: Supercov on every change, an agent-based scan before a release.
How we measured
- Benchmark: 72 of RealVuln’s 140 repositories, the half we did not tune the checks on, each at the commit its labels were written for. They are deliberately vulnerable Python, TypeScript and JavaScript apps, so results on production code will differ.
- Supercov: version 2.0.1 with its default settings, one repository at a time on a laptop. Cost is Jev’s list price of $42 per billion input tokens.
- Other scanners: their findings, times and costs are RealVuln’s own published runs, and their times come from different machines. We timed Semgrep ourselves, with the same version and settings, on the laptop that ran Supercov. GLM-5.3 had 3 failed runs, counted as finding nothing.
- Scoring: a finding counts when it names the right file, a matching vulnerability type and a line within 10 of the label. A finding for a whole file, without a line, counts once for a labelled vulnerability of its type in that file, as RealVuln’s own matcher allows.
Download the results or everything needed to rerun it: Supercov’s report for every repository, the times and the scoring script. Run September 25, 2026; rescored October 1, 2026 to count findings without a line.
See also Security scanners compared.