OWASP ZAP vs Snyk

Free and open source

From $25 per contributing developer/month (indicative, Team)

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

Priced per contributing developer. Enterprise agreements add reporting and governance and get expensive.

Everything, self-hosted

Free plan with a monthly test allowance, generous enough for small projects.

Category standard

Checkmarx / OWASP · since 2010

Category standard

Snyk · since 2015

• 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.

• Reachability analysis dramatically cuts the noise from transitive dependency alerts.
• Automated fix pull requests make remediation a merge rather than a project.
• One vendor covers dependencies, code, containers and IaC.

• 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.

• Per-developer pricing scales uncomfortably in large engineering organisations.
• SAST is less deep than dedicated code-analysis vendors.
• Still produces substantial alert volume on older codebases.

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

Engineering teams that want security findings arriving in the pull request with a fix attached.