OWASP ZAP vs Semgrep

Free and open source

From $40 per contributor/month (indicative)

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

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

Everything, self-hosted

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

Category standard

Checkmarx / OWASP · since 2010

Widely used

Semgrep · since 2020

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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