OWASP ZAP vs GitGuardian
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 tier available
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Free tier covers small teams entirely; business pricing is quote-based per developer.
Free tier
Everything, self-hosted
Free for individuals and teams up to 25 developers.
Open source
Apache-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
Checkmarx / OWASP · since 2010
Widely used
GitGuardian · 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.
- Validity checking distinguishes a live credential from a revoked one, which transforms triage priority.
- Scans full commit history, where most leaked secrets actually live.
- Free for teams up to 25 developers.
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.
- Secrets scanning only — not a general security platform.
- Historical scans on old repositories produce a large initial backlog.
- Requires repository access, which needs a security review of its own.
Best for
Any team that currently does no dynamic security testing at all.
Any organisation with more than a handful of repositories and no secrets scanning today.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.