Veracode 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.

VeracodeOWASP ZAP

Entry price

Quote on request

Quote only

Free and open source

Open source

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

Enterprise annual subscriptions priced by application count and scan types.

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

Free tier

No free tier.

Everything, self-hosted

Open source

Apache-2.0

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaC#JavaScriptPythonGoPHPRubyKotlinSwift

JavaPythonJavaScriptCodeless

Platforms

WebAPIiOSAndroidDesktop

WebAPI

Fits teams

Enterprise

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Widely used

Veracode · since 2006

Category standard

Checkmarx / OWASP · since 2010

Strengths

Binary scanning works on third-party and supplier software where source is unavailable.
Policy engine and attestation reports satisfy regulated procurement directly.
Managed service model suits organisations without a security engineering team.

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

Slow feedback compared with developer-first tools — poor fit for per-commit scanning.
Expensive per application.
Developer experience lags Snyk and Semgrep considerably.

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

Regulated enterprises needing formal security attestation, including for supplier software.

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

All of these integrate with: Jenkins.

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