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.
Entry price
Free and open source
Open sourceQuote on request
Quote onlyWhat 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
Platforms
Fits teams
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.
- 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.
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.