OWASP ZAP vs CodeQL

Free and open source

From $30 per committer/month (GitHub Advanced Security, indicative)

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

Free on public repos. Private repositories require GitHub Advanced Security, priced per active committer.

Everything, self-hosted

Free for public repositories on GitHub.

Category standard

Checkmarx / OWASP · since 2010

Widely used

GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2019

• 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.

• Interprocedural dataflow analysis finds real vulnerabilities that regex- and pattern-based tools cannot see.
• Free on public repositories, with results in the GitHub security tab.
• Custom queries let you encode organisation-specific security rules.

• 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.

• Writing custom CodeQL queries is a specialist skill with a steep learning curve.
• Analysis is slow — minutes to tens of minutes, so it fits nightly better than per-commit.
• Private-repo licensing through Advanced Security is expensive at scale.

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

GitHub-hosted projects wanting deep static security analysis, free if the repo is public.