Mend.io 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.

Mend.ioOWASP ZAP

Entry price

Quote on request

Quote only

Free and open source

Open source

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

Quote-based enterprise pricing, typically per developer or per application.

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

Free tier

Free tier for small teams on Mend's developer products.

Everything, self-hosted

Open source

Apache-2.0

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaJavaScriptTypeScriptPythonC#GoRubyPHPKotlinSwift

JavaPythonJavaScript

Platforms

WebAPI

Fits teams

Scale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Widely used

Mend.io · since 2011

Category standard

Checkmarx / OWASP · since 2010

Strengths

Licence compliance reporting is the strongest in the category and often the reason legal approves a release.
Reachability analysis reduces the transitive-dependency alert flood.
Automated remediation pull requests.

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

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

Enterprises where open-source licence compliance is as important as vulnerability management.

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

All of these integrate with: Jenkins.

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