Checkmarx One 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.
Entry price
Quote on request
Quote onlyFree and open source
Open sourceWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Enterprise annual licensing, typically by developer count or lines of code. Six figures at scale.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Free tier
Free trial.
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
Apache-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Checkmarx · since 2006
Category standard
Checkmarx / OWASP · since 2010
Strengths
- Very deep SAST analysis with wide language coverage including legacy enterprise languages.
- One platform and one risk view across every scan type.
- Strong compliance and audit reporting.
- 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
- Expensive, with a long procurement and deployment cycle.
- High false-positive volume typical of deep SAST; tuning is a project.
- Scans are slow relative to developer-first tools.
- 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
Large enterprises with a security function and regulatory obligations.
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.