OWASP ZAP vs Mend.io
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.
Quote-based enterprise pricing, typically per developer or per application.
Free tier
Everything, self-hosted
Free tier for small teams on Mend's developer products.
Open source
Apache-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
Checkmarx / OWASP · since 2010
Widely used
Mend.io · since 2011
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.
- 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.
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.
- SAST is weaker than dedicated code-analysis vendors.
- Enterprise pricing and sales process.
- Interface is dated in places.
Best for
Any team that currently does no dynamic security testing at all.
Enterprises where open-source licence compliance is as important as vulnerability management.
All of these integrate with: Jenkins.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.