Semgrep vs OWASP ZAP

From $40 per contributor/month (indicative)

Free and open source

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

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

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

Everything, self-hosted

Widely used

Semgrep · since 2020

Category standard

Checkmarx / OWASP · since 2010

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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