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OWASP ZAP vs Veracode

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 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 subscriptions priced by application count and scan types.

Free tier

Everything, self-hosted

No free tier.

Open source

Apache-2.0

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaPythonJavaScriptCodeless
JavaC#JavaScriptPythonGoPHPRubyKotlinSwift

Platforms

WebAPI
WebAPIiOSAndroidDesktop

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
Enterprise

Adoption

Category standard

Checkmarx / OWASP · since 2010

Widely used

Veracode · 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.
  • Binary scanning works on third-party and supplier software where source is unavailable.
  • Policy engine and attestation reports satisfy regulated procurement directly.
  • Managed service model suits organisations without a security engineering team.

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.
  • Slow feedback compared with developer-first tools — poor fit for per-commit scanning.
  • Expensive per application.
  • Developer experience lags Snyk and Semgrep considerably.

Best for

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

Regulated enterprises needing formal security attestation, including for supplier software.

All of these integrate with: Jenkins.

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