Burp Suite vs OWASP ZAP

From $475 per user/year (Professional)

Free and open source

Professional is inexpensive for what it does; Enterprise is quote-based by scanning agents and applications.

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

Community Edition is free but omits the scanner and rate-limits key tools.

Everything, self-hosted

Category standard

PortSwigger · since 2003

Category standard

Checkmarx / OWASP · since 2010

• The reference tool for manual application penetration testing — every security professional knows it.
• Exceptional scanner accuracy, particularly for injection classes.
• Professional Edition is remarkably good value at under $500 per year.

• Free, with no licence limits on scanning or users.
• The baseline scan runs in CI in a couple of minutes and catches real misconfiguration.
• Active community and extensive add-on marketplace.

• Community Edition is too limited for serious automated work.
• Requires security expertise; it is not a push-button product for developers.
• Enterprise licensing is a significant step up in cost.

• Higher false-positive rate than commercial DAST tools.
• Scanning authenticated, JavaScript-heavy applications requires meaningful configuration effort.
• The interface is dated and the learning curve is real.

Security teams and penetration testers, plus enterprises needing scheduled authenticated scanning.

Any team that currently does no dynamic security testing at all.