Trivy 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
Free and open source
Open sourceFree and open source
Open sourceWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Free tier
Everything, self-hosted
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
Apache-2.0
Apache-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
Aqua Security · since 2019
Category standard
Checkmarx / OWASP · since 2010
Strengths
- Free and covers container, IaC, secret and dependency scanning in one binary.
- Fast enough to run on every image build without slowing the pipeline.
- Excellent Kubernetes integration through the Trivy Operator.
- 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
- No hosted dashboard or workflow — findings go to your pipeline output.
- No reachability analysis, so alert volume is high on large images.
- Reporting for compliance requires building it yourself.
- 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
Container and Kubernetes pipelines that need free, comprehensive scanning.
Any team that currently does no dynamic security testing at all.
All of these integrate with: Docker, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.