Renovate 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.

RenovateOWASP ZAP

Entry price

Free and open source

Open source

Free and open source

Open source

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

Free and open source, including the hosted GitHub app. Mend sells an enterprise edition with support.

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

Free tier

Everything, self-hosted

Open source

AGPL-3.0

Apache-2.0

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScriptTypeScriptPythonJavaC#GoRubyPHPKotlinSwift

JavaPythonJavaScript

Platforms

WebAPI

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Category standard

Mend.io · since 2017

Category standard

Checkmarx / OWASP · since 2010

Strengths

Far more configurable than Dependabot — grouping, scheduling and automerge rules that keep PR volume sane.
Supports dozens of package managers including Docker, Terraform, Helm and GitHub Actions.
Free hosted app, or self-host it entirely.

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

Teams that outgrew Dependabot's limited configuration and want update policy under control.

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

All of these integrate with: Docker.

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