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testcritic

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)

Paid

From $30 per contributor/month (Teams, per product)

Free tier

What 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

JavaPythonCodeless
PythonJavaScriptTypeScriptJavaGoC#RubyPHPKotlinSwift

Platforms

WebAPI
WebAPI

Fits teams

Scale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

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.