OWASP ZAP vs Burp Suite

Free and open source

From $475 per user/year (Professional)

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

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

Everything, self-hosted

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

Category standard

Checkmarx / OWASP · since 2010

Category standard

PortSwigger · since 2003

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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