Burp Suite vs CodeQL
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.
Entry price
From $499 per user/year (Professional)
PaidFrom $30 per active committer/month (GitHub Code Security)
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
PortSwigger raised Professional from $449 to $499 per user/year on 6 January 2026. Licences are strictly per named user and cannot be shared. Enterprise is quote-based by scanning agents and applications.
Free on public repos. For private repositories GitHub split Advanced Security into two products in April 2025: Code Security at $30 and Secret Protection at $19 per active committer/month, both now available on Team plans as well as Enterprise. CodeQL sits in Code Security. Billing counts active committers, not seats, which can surprise teams with many occasional contributors.
Free tier
Community Edition is free but omits the scanner and rate-limits key tools.
Free for public repositories on GitHub.
Open source
MIT (queries)
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
PortSwigger · since 2003
Widely used
GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2019
Strengths
- The reference tool for manual application penetration testing — every security professional knows it.
- Exceptional scanner accuracy, particularly for injection classes.
- Professional Edition is remarkably good value at under $500 per year.
- Interprocedural dataflow analysis finds real vulnerabilities that regex- and pattern-based tools cannot see.
- Free on public repositories, with results in the GitHub security tab.
- Custom queries let you encode organisation-specific security rules.
Limitations
- Community Edition is too limited for serious automated work.
- Requires security expertise; it is not a push-button product for developers.
- Enterprise licensing is a significant step up in cost.
- Writing custom CodeQL queries is a specialist skill with a steep learning curve.
- Analysis is slow — minutes to tens of minutes, so it fits nightly better than per-commit.
- Private-repo licensing through Advanced Security is expensive at scale.
Best for
Security teams and penetration testers, plus enterprises needing scheduled authenticated scanning.
GitHub-hosted projects wanting deep static security analysis, free if the repo is public.
All of these integrate with: Jenkins, GitHub Actions.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.