OWASP ZAP vs Dependabot
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 sourceFree
FreeWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Completely free. Advanced Security features such as code scanning are separately licensed.
Free tier
Everything, self-hosted
Free on all GitHub repositories including private ones.
Open source
Apache-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
Checkmarx / OWASP · since 2010
Category standard
GitHub (Microsoft) · since 2017
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.
- 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.
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.
- 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.
Best for
Any team that currently does no dynamic security testing at all.
Every GitHub repository, as the free baseline before considering a paid SCA tool.
All of these integrate with: GitHub Actions.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.