Burp Suite vs Semgrep

From $475 per user/year (Professional)

From $40 per contributor/month (indicative)

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

The CLI plus community rules costs nothing and covers a lot; paid tiers add the platform, supply chain and secrets.

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

Open-source CLI is free and complete; hosted platform free for up to 10 contributors.

Category standard

PortSwigger · since 2003

Widely used

Semgrep · since 2020

• 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.

• Custom rules are genuinely writable — you can encode your own security or architecture standards in an afternoon.
• Free CLI with a large community rule registry is immediately useful.
• Fast enough to run on every pull request without complaint.

• 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.

• Pattern matching without full dataflow misses some vulnerability classes.
• Community rule quality is uneven; expect to curate.
• Advanced dataflow and supply-chain features are paid only.

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

Teams that want customisable static analysis and can start entirely for free.