Snyk vs OWASP ZAP
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
From $25 per contributing developer/month (indicative, Team)
Free tierFree and open source
Open sourceWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Priced per contributing developer. Enterprise agreements add reporting and governance and get expensive.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Free tier
Free plan with a monthly test allowance, generous enough for small projects.
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
Apache-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
Snyk · since 2015
Category standard
Checkmarx / OWASP · since 2010
Strengths
- Reachability analysis dramatically cuts the noise from transitive dependency alerts.
- Automated fix pull requests make remediation a merge rather than a project.
- One vendor covers dependencies, code, containers and IaC.
- 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.
Limitations
- Per-developer pricing scales uncomfortably in large engineering organisations.
- SAST is less deep than dedicated code-analysis vendors.
- Still produces substantial alert volume on older codebases.
- 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.
Best for
Engineering teams that want security findings arriving in the pull request with a fix attached.
Any team that currently does no dynamic security testing at all.
All of these integrate with: Jenkins, Docker.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.