Dependabot vs OWASP ZAP

Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.

DependabotOWASP ZAP

Entry price

Free

Free and open source

Open source

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

Completely free. Advanced Security features such as code scanning are separately licensed.

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

Free tier

Free on all GitHub repositories including private ones.

Everything, self-hosted

Open source

Apache-2.0

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScriptTypeScriptPythonJavaC#GoRubyPHPKotlinSwift

JavaPythonJavaScript

Platforms

WebAPI

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Category standard

GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2017

Category standard

Checkmarx / OWASP · since 2010

Strengths

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.

Limitations

No reachability analysis, so it reports vulnerabilities in code you never call.
PR noise is a genuine problem on large dependency trees without grouping configured.
GitHub only.

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.

Best for

Every GitHub repository, as the free baseline before considering a paid SCA tool.

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

All of these integrate with: GitHub Actions.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.