Trivy vs OWASP ZAP

Free and open source

Free and open source

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

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

Everything, self-hosted

Everything, self-hosted

Category standard

Aqua Security · since 2019

Category standard

Checkmarx / OWASP · since 2010

• Free and covers container, IaC, secret and dependency scanning in one binary.
• Fast enough to run on every image build without slowing the pipeline.
• Excellent Kubernetes integration through the Trivy Operator.

• 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.

• No hosted dashboard or workflow — findings go to your pipeline output.
• No reachability analysis, so alert volume is high on large images.
• Reporting for compliance requires building it yourself.

• 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.

Container and Kubernetes pipelines that need free, comprehensive scanning.

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