Burp Suite vs Semgrep
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 contributor/month (Teams, per product)
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.
The CLI plus community rules costs nothing and covers a lot. Teams is priced per product per contributor — Code $30, Supply Chain $30, Secrets $15 — so scanning for all three multiplies the per-contributor figure.
Free tier
Community Edition is free but omits the scanner and rate-limits key tools.
Open-source CLI is free and complete; hosted platform free for up to 10 contributors.
Open source
LGPL-2.1 (CLI)
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
PortSwigger · since 2003
Widely used
Semgrep · since 2020
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.
- 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.
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.
- 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.
Best for
Security teams and penetration testers, plus enterprises needing scheduled authenticated scanning.
Teams that want customisable static analysis and can start entirely for free.
All of these integrate with: Jenkins, Jira.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.