Mend.io 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.
Quote-based enterprise pricing, typically per developer or per application.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Free tier
Free tier for small teams on Mend's developer products.
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
Apache-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Mend.io · since 2011
Category standard
Checkmarx / OWASP · since 2010
Strengths
- Licence compliance reporting is the strongest in the category and often the reason legal approves a release.
- Reachability analysis reduces the transitive-dependency alert flood.
- Automated remediation pull requests.
- 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
- SAST is weaker than dedicated code-analysis vendors.
- Enterprise pricing and sales process.
- Interface is dated in places.
- 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
Enterprises where open-source licence compliance is as important as vulnerability management.
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.