Dependabot 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
Free
FreeFree and open source
Open sourceWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Completely free. Advanced Security features such as code scanning are separately licensed.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Free tier
Free on all GitHub repositories including private ones.
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
Apache-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2017
Category standard
Checkmarx / OWASP · since 2010
Strengths
- Free and requires a single config file to enable.
- Version-bump pull requests mean remediation is a review, not a task.
- Grouped updates keep the PR volume manageable.
- 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
- No reachability analysis, so it reports vulnerabilities in code you never call.
- PR noise is a genuine problem on large dependency trees without grouping configured.
- GitHub only.
- 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
Every GitHub repository, as the free baseline before considering a paid SCA tool.
Any team that currently does no dynamic security testing at all.
All of these integrate with: GitHub Actions.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.