OWASP ZAP vs Checkmarx One

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.

OWASP ZAPCheckmarx One

Entry price

Free and open source

Open source

Quote on request

Quote only

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

Enterprise annual licensing, typically by developer count or lines of code. Six figures at scale.

Free tier

Everything, self-hosted

Free trial.

Open source

Apache-2.0

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaPythonJavaScriptCodeless

JavaC#JavaScriptTypeScriptPythonGoPHPRubyKotlin

Platforms

WebAPI

WebAPIDesktopMainframe

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Enterprise

Adoption

Category standard

Checkmarx / OWASP · since 2010

Widely used

Checkmarx · since 2006

Strengths

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.

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.

Limitations

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

Any team that currently does no dynamic security testing at all.

Large enterprises with a security function and regulatory obligations.

All of these integrate with: Jenkins.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.