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Heeler vs Cycode.
Two Agentic Development Security platforms that prevent, fix, and operate on a deep code context engine — Cycode is a close competitor with deep software-supply-chain roots.
Broad, real overlap — with divergence on fix, runtime, and closure.
The overlap is broad and real — native AI-SAST, SCA with reachability, validated secrets, gen-time MCP guardrails, exploitability-aware prioritization, SBOMs, and agentic workflows are genuine parity. Cycode is a close competitor with deep software-supply-chain roots.
Heeler's edges concentrate where the two diverge: fixes proven by a real sandbox build and CI repair (Cycode generates fix PRs but doesn't build or test them), source-based endpoint and API discovery (which Cycode doesn't do), native sensor-less production runtime observation (Cycode's runtime context is correlated/ingested, native only at build time), and runtime-verified closure.
Cycode's genuine advantages are its supply-chain heritage: CI/CD pipeline and SCM security, broad IaC scanning, and third-party ASPM aggregation. Scope here is code security.
Two deep platforms; where they diverge is fix, native runtime, and closure.
Both do native code detection, gen-time MCP guardrails, exploitability-aware prioritization, and agentic workflows, and both are recognized ASPM leaders. The divergence is narrow: how a fix is proven (a real build + CI repair vs a generated, human-reviewed PR), whether production runtime is observed or correlated/ingested, whether the app's endpoint attack surface is discovered from source, and whether closure is verified in production. Scope here is code security.
Complete ASPM + agentic development security
Native scanners, supply-chain depth, agentic autonomy.
- →Native scanners (AI-SAST with a deterministic core + agentic reasoning, SCA, secrets, IaC, container) + a Context/Risk Intelligence Graph for exploitability-aware prioritization
- →Signature CI/CD pipeline and SCM security: least-privilege + insider-threat anomaly detection, and Cimon — an eBPF build-runner hardening agent with SLSA provenance and a runtime-observed build SBOM; plus source-code-leak detection
- →MCP-based AI-guardrails (intercept prompts/file-reads/MCP-tool-calls), Maestro agentic workflows that generate fix PRs, and ConnectorX aggregation across 100+ third-party tools
- →Production runtime/cloud context is correlated/ingested (no native prod runtime agent; native eBPF is build-time only); fixes are generated PRs gated by review, not built and CI-repaired to green; no source-based endpoint discovery
Modeled around the running service
Prevent, Fix, and Operate on one runtime-aware model.
- →One context engine across six dimensions (code, cloud/runtime, business, ownership, threat, agent), sensor-less and read-only — runtime exposure is a native input
- →Its own detection — SAST, build-graph SCA (14 ecosystems, GitHub Actions first-class), validated secrets, agent-file governance — plus an MCP server, Agent Skills, and a CLI
- →Prioritizes by runtime reachability and internet exposure; remediation is built in a sandbox and repaired in your CI until green, committed into the PR
- →Guardrails gate new risk at the PR; workflows operate to a runtime-verified close with per-finding SLOs
Side-by-side, with a verdict per row.
Four states. Parity-heavy and honest — Cycode is a close competitor and recognized ASPM/SSCS leader.
Heeler advantage
Heeler delivers a capability Cycode doesn't, or in a way that changes outcomes.
Heeler edge
Both deliver the capability. Heeler's implementation is materially better on a verifiable dimension.
Parity
Both products deliver the capability comparably.
Cycode advantage
Explicit signal that Cycode leads on this row.
| Section | ● Heeler advantage | ◐ Heeler edge | ✓ Parity | ○ Cycode advantage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Prevent | – | 1 | 2 | – |
| Fix | 1 | 2 | – | – |
| Operate | 1 | 3 | 7 | 2 |
| Total | 2 | 6 | 9 | 2 |
| Capability | Heeler | Cycode | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prevent · stop risk before and as it enters | |||
| Security at AI code generation | Heeler's MCP server hands the coding agent its runtime-aware context as it writes — 30+ read-only tools exposing live SAST, SCA, and secrets findings, endpoint exposure, runtime and deployment risk, guardrail status, and SLO pressure, plus named secure-development prompts — and can trigger Heeler's validated remediation with the right scope. Drop-in Agent Skills and the CLI cover the same surface locally, for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and VS Code. | Cycode's AI Guardrails treat the IDE/CLI as a security boundary via AI hooks and a Cycode MCP server — intercepting outbound prompts, file reads, and MCP tool calls to block secret/PII egress and policy violations, and enriching the coding agent with security context and skills before it acts. A genuinely comparable gen-time control layer; both companies build for the agentic-development category. | ✓Parity |
| CLI / local developer scanning | The heelercli runs local scans across the full surface — SAST, SCA, secrets (with live validation), license, and malicious-package checks — with non-zero exit for pre-commit and CI, SARIF output, and policy-as-code; plus IDE reach through the MCP server. | Cycode runs its native scanners locally through a CLI and IDE plugins (VS Code, JetBrains), with pre-commit hooks that block secrets and findings before they're committed, plus inline PR and terminal findings. A comparable local and IDE developer surface. | ✓Parity |
| PR guardrails & policy enforcement | Block / Warn / Observe guardrails post a native status check on GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps and gate PRs on new dependency vulnerabilities, dependency hygiene, SAST, secrets, and SLO breaches — scoped by runtime context (enforce only on Tier-1, production, or internet-facing services) — with a validated fix committed straight into the PR branch. Block relies on SCM branch protection to enforce. | Cycode gates pull requests with detect / block / monitor policies, PR status checks, and branch protection across GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps, and can auto-open a fix PR for some finding types. Strong PR gating; enforcement keys on policy and severity rather than a runtime-exposure scope, and it opens a suggested fix PR rather than committing a fix validated by a build into the branch. | ◐Heeler edge |
| Fix · resolve findings — code and dependencies | |||
| SAST autofix | Deterministic, strategy-matched transforms (Parameterize / Escape / Allowlist / Path-Normalize) anchored to the exact source-to-sink flow, precomputed per finding on every scan, confidence- and effort-scored, and delivered as PRs validated the same way as dependency fixes (sandbox build + CI repair). Findings needing an architectural change get written guidance instead. | Cycode's Remediation Agent (Maestro) generates context-aware code fixes for SAST findings and can open a pull request autonomously within a workflow, or surface an AI-suggested fix the developer applies in one click. AI-generated and human-reviewed, gated by confidence thresholds, rather than deterministic transforms proven by a build. | ◐Heeler edge |
| SCA autofix (upgrades) | Deterministic, multi-signal upgrade selection over the resolved graph — Heeler picks the version that clears the most risk with the least disruption (no new known vulnerabilities, proven adoption, cleared minimum-age cooldown), and for transitive vulns finds the smallest bump to the direct ancestor you control (npm, Go, Cargo). Every fix is built in a sandbox and repaired through your CI until green before merge. Auto-fixable across Java, Go, JavaScript, Python, and C#. | Cycode remediates open-source vulnerabilities with one-click PR suggestions (via PR scan, CLI, or IDE) and bulk remediation across many instances. It opens a suggested upgrade PR rather than selecting the version with multi-signal analysis and building and CI-repairing the change to green before merge. | ◐Heeler edge |
| Validated, merge-ready fixes (build + CI repair) | Heeler validates every fix twice: a real build in an isolated sandbox with your project's toolchain before the PR (mvn/Gradle, npm/pnpm/Yarn, pip/uv/Poetry, go build, dotnet), then — once the PR is open — it runs your CI and repairs its own build/test failures with up to five follow-up commits until green, or hands off with an explanation. Draft PR if the sandbox build didn't pass; human review, no auto-merge. | Cycode's agents generate fixes and open pull requests, with the safety gate being human review and confidence thresholds, and its Remediation Agent claims fixes “without breaking functionality.” The docs don't describe building the project in a sandbox and running your CI to repair the fix's own build/test failures until green — validation is human PR review, not a build-and-repair loop. | ●Heeler advantage |
| Operate · detect, prioritize, and run the program | |||
| SAST detection | Path-aware, interprocedural source-to-sink taint analysis across functions and files — plus structural (Graphscan) and heuristic methods — from Heeler's own engine, with detection rules adapted per codebase, automatic reachability/exposure triage, and step-by-step data-flow proof. | Cycode's native AI-SAST runs a deterministic engine (a low false-positive core), an AI layer that writes repo-specific deterministic rules, and Agentic Code Security that reasons from the code — building a threat model, catching logic, authorization, and cross-file/cross-service flaws, and validating exploitability before surfacing a finding. A genuinely comparable, context-aware static engine. | ✓Parity |
| Dependency vulnerability (CVE) detection | Build-graph SCA across 14 ecosystems that resolves the full direct-and-transitive graph itself from your manifests — and from committed lockfiles when present, without requiring one or changing your build — matched with CVSS, EPSS, and known-exploited signals, covering first-party and bundled dependencies too, with GitHub Actions as a first-class ecosystem. | Cycode's native SCA identifies components through deep manifest and binary analysis, resolves direct and transitive dependencies, cross-references CVE databases, flags license risk, and pairs reachability with AI exploitability analysis to focus on what's exploitable in context. Comparable dependency coverage, and it can also ingest third-party SCA findings. | ✓Parity |
| Secrets detection & validation | First-class secrets: full git-history scanning across all branches with commit attribution, active live validation (read-only calls to the issuing provider; an active secret is weighted as maximal impact), offline structural validation, and 700+ rules across 20+ languages; contained and gated at the PR. | Cycode's Secrets Engine natively detects hardcoded and leaked secrets across code, git history, build logs, IaC templates, documentation, and productivity tools (Slack, Confluence, Jira), validates their status, blocks at the PR and pre-commit, and underpins its non-human-identity security. Comparable first-class secrets detection with validation and broad location coverage. | ✓Parity |
| Dependency reachability & noise reduction | Heeler treats a dependency vuln as reachable only when two independent checks agree: runtime reachability (the library is loaded in a running deployment) and static call-graph reachability to the vulnerable functions across six ecosystems (Go, Java, Python, JS/TS, Rust, Ruby). Unreachable findings are auto-mitigated; elsewhere it uses runtime reachability and errs toward reachable. | Cycode pairs static reachability (is the vulnerable function called) with bulk AI exploitability analysis (do the conditions for exploitation actually exist in this app and environment), running exploitability verdicts across many SAST/SCA findings at once to cut the backlog to the exploitable few. A genuinely strong, context-reasoned noise-reduction approach. | ✓Parity |
| Endpoint & API attack-surface discovery | Heeler enumerates every endpoint from source — REST, GraphQL, gRPC, SOAP, and WebSocket, plus the MCP tools/resources/prompts and Spring Boot actuator routes your code exposes — capturing each one's authentication posture and computing internet-accessibility from deployment topology, so your externally reachable, unauthenticated surface is inventoried with no runtime agents or traffic capture. | Not offered. Cycode uses “attack surface” for the AI and supply-chain surface (agents, rule files, pipelines) and treats internet-exposure as a prioritization attribute on a finding, but it doesn't enumerate your application's endpoints and APIs from source with each one's authentication posture and internet-accessibility. | ●Heeler advantage |
| CI/CD pipeline & SCM security | Heeler treats GitHub Actions and reusable workflows as a first-class scanned dependency ecosystem (pin status, provenance, integrity) and gates risk at the PR, but it isn't a pipeline-and-SCM posture product — no least-privilege/access auditing, insider-threat anomaly detection, or build-runner runtime hardening. | Cycode's heritage and a genuine strength: SCM and CI/CD posture (least-privilege access auditing, MFA/SSO enforcement, separation of duties, pipeline inventory and misconfiguration), user-behavior anomaly / insider-threat detection, and Cimon — an eBPF build-runner agent that observes process/network/file activity in the build, blocks supply-chain attacks, and produces SLSA provenance and a runtime-observed build SBOM. | ○Cycode advantage |
| Cloud, runtime & business context | Heeler builds its own model of where code runs — containers, VMs, and serverless fingerprinted, each deployment mapped to the exact running changeset, internet-accessibility auto-detected, service tier (1–4) and prod/non-prod classified, service-to-service and identity edges resolved, and ownership resolved to the owning team, with Tech Lead and Security Lead points of contact — all read-only and sensor-less. This context is what makes exposure, prioritization, and routing real. | Cycode's Context/Risk Intelligence Graph correlates code, pipelines, secrets, and cloud resources and maps code to its exposure in production — but the production runtime and cloud signals are correlated and ingested (cloud is a connector category), not observed by Cycode. Its only native runtime telemetry is Cimon on the CI/CD build runner; there is no native production runtime or cloud agent, so the deeper deployment model is inferred rather than observed. | ◐Heeler edge |
| Risk-based prioritization | Heeler Risk (Urgent / Plan / Defer) ranks SAST and SCA findings by real exposure. For SCA, a vuln must clear a gate: reachable (runtime-loaded, plus a call-graph path where supported) AND internet-exposed (an active deployment on internet-reachable compute) AND not mitigated — fail any and it Defers, however high the CVSS. For SAST, exposure is path-driven from an internet-facing entry point, behind auth, touching sensitive data. Both are weighted by service tier and threat (KEV/EPSS; CWE class), with a per-finding SLO, re-scored continuously. | Cycode's graph prioritizes with exploitability (an AI Exploitability Agent), static reachability, internet exposure, business criticality, data sensitivity, and ownership/blast-radius — claiming to surface the critical few and cut developer noise. A comparably sophisticated, context-rich prioritization engine (though EPSS and CISA-KEV aren't named among its signals). | ✓Parity |
| Multi-tool / third-party ASPM aggregation | Heeler is its own detection-and-fix engine. It brings native SAST, SCA, secrets, and agent-file analysis and exports findings (SARIF, API), but unifying, normalizing, and deduplicating the output of many other vendors' scanners is not its focus. | Alongside its native detection, Cycode's ConnectorX ingests findings from 100+ third-party tools (SAST/SCA/DAST/cloud/infrastructure scanners, SCMs, CI/CD, ticketing), normalizing, deduplicating, correlating, and re-scoring them in one graph — a genuine ASPM aggregation layer over the tools you already run. | ○Cycode advantage |
| Agent-file & AI-supply-chain governance | A dedicated repo-level inventory scores every agent instruction/skill/subagent/hook/MCP-config file (CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, .claude/skills, .cursor, .mcp.json, .codex) 0–100 across Static, LLM-intent, and External-reference risk, with a Malicious / Suspicious / Benign verdict, across Claude, Cursor, Gemini, Codex, and OpenCode — with a CI-gating API and a workflow trigger. | Cycode discovers the AI supply chain in code — coding assistants, models, MCP servers, AI packages/secrets, rule files (.cursorrules/.windsurfrules), and skill files — with full-content visibility, provenance, and generic risk scoring; attributes commits to specific AI agents (Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor) and links them to the violations they introduced; and governs via an AIBOM, allow/block policy, and MCP enforcement. Broad AI-supply-chain visibility and governance, with a different emphasis than Heeler's per-file malicious-intent verdict. | ◐Heeler edge |
| SBOM & dependency inventory | A live dependency inventory (with OpenSSF hygiene scoring) and CycloneDX SBOMs at five scopes — including runtime SBOMs per running service and per deployment, built from real runtime context — alongside global, application, and repository scopes. | Cycode natively generates (and ingests) SPDX and CycloneDX SBOMs kept current with code changes, and — via Cimon on the build runner — a runtime-observed build SBOM that captures what actually executed during the build (dynamically fetched deps, vendored and statically-linked code). Comparable inventory breadth, with a strong build-time runtime SBOM. | ✓Parity |
| Automated response workflows & routing | A standing when-this-then-that engine across the whole estate: one trigger (new finding, fix available, compromised dependency, new secret, at-risk agent file, SLO expiring, PR merged with unresolved guardrail violations) → AND-combined conditions → up to three chained actions that share context. Actions span messaging (Slack/Teams/Google Chat/email), ticketing (Jira/Linear/GitHub/Shortcut, de-duplicated), and domain actions (Fix with Heeler Agent, Update SLO Override, Generate SBOM, Webhook), routed to the owning team, with a plain-English builder. | Cycode's Maestro orchestrates agentic workflows (trigger → filters → ordered agent flow → human controls) that triage, validate exploitability, generate fix PRs, and rebuild containers, plus Remediation Campaigns for scoped, owner-assigned, due-dated remediation with burn-down tracking and ticketing. Comparable, and genuinely strong, workflow automation and routing. | ✓Parity |
| SLOs & runtime-verified closure | Every tracked finding under an SLO policy carries a per-band (Urgent / Plan / Defer) SLO clock; SLO-expiring events trigger workflows, and an Update SLO Override action can extend a due date automatically. Findings run Active → Fixed → Deployed, and closure is runtime-verified — a fix reaches Deployed only once every running deployment confirms the vulnerability is actually gone, not merely merged. | Cycode tracks SLAs (workflows trigger on missed SLA; escalation templates) and runs Remediation Campaigns with due dates and burn-down, and auto-resolves findings a subsequent scan no longer detects. Strong SLA and campaign tracking; closure is a resolved violation state / re-scan, not gated on every running deployment confirming the vulnerability is actually gone. | ◐Heeler edge |
Where the two platforms diverge.
Broad parity on the code-security core, with a handful of real divergences.
Fixes proven by a real build and CI, not generated and human-gated
Both platforms auto-fix — Cycode's Maestro Remediation Agent generates context-aware fixes and opens pull requests, gated by human review and confidence thresholds. Heeler goes further on proof: it builds every fix in an isolated sandbox with your toolchain, and once the PR is open runs your CI and repairs its own build/test failures with follow-up commits until green — or opens a draft PR with an explanation. A fix asserted “without breaking functionality” is not the same as one demonstrated to build and pass tests.
Production runtime observed, not correlated from ingested tools
Cycode talks code-to-cloud and “Prompt to Runtime,” but its production runtime and cloud context is correlated over the graph and ingested from connectors — its only native runtime telemetry is Cimon on the CI/CD build runner, not production. Heeler builds its own deployment model sensor-less: each deployment mapped to the exact running changeset, internet-accessibility, service tier, and ownership — exposure and prioritization run on runtime Heeler observes itself.
The endpoint and API attack surface, discovered from source
Cycode uses “attack surface” for the AI and supply-chain surface and treats internet-exposure as a finding attribute, but it doesn't enumerate your application's endpoints and APIs from source. Heeler inventories every route — REST, GraphQL, gRPC, SOAP, WebSocket, plus MCP and actuator interfaces — with each one's authentication posture and internet-accessibility, so your externally reachable, unauthenticated surface is a first-class object, not an attribute.
Runtime-verified closure, not SLA tracking and re-scan
Cycode tracks SLAs and campaign burn-down and auto-resolves what a re-scan no longer detects. Heeler moves each finding Active → Fixed → Deployed and closes it only when every running deployment confirms the vulnerability is actually gone — per-finding SLO clocks driving the program to proof-in-production, not a violation marked resolved.
One native engine, not breadth stitched from correlation and ingestion
Cycode's supply-chain breadth is real and a genuine strength — pipeline security, IaC, source-code-leak detection, and aggregation across 100+ tools. But its production runtime is correlated and ingested, and its fixes are generated PRs gated by review. Heeler is a single native engine that observes runtime, detects natively, and delivers validated fixes and runtime-verified closure — depth on the code-security core rather than breadth that leans on correlation for the runtime picture.
See Heeler on your codebase.
A demo runs Heeler against your real repos and cloud — native detection across the surface, the runtime map, the prioritization, the validated remediation PRs, and the agent-file catalog. Cycode and Heeler overlap on the code-security core; where it counts, we'll show what fixes proven in CI, natively-observed runtime context, source-based endpoint discovery, and verified-in-production closure add on top.
