TruffleHog 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 tier available
Free tierFree and open source
Open sourceWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Free CLI; the enterprise platform adds continuous monitoring and reporting, priced on request.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Free tier
Open-source CLI is free and fully functional including verification.
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
AGPL-3.0
Apache-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Truffle Security · since 2016
Category standard
Checkmarx / OWASP · since 2010
Strengths
- Live verification cuts false positives to near zero for supported providers.
- Free and easy to add as a pre-commit hook or CI step.
- Scans far beyond git — buckets, images, logs.
- 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 dashboard or workflow in the free CLI.
- Verification requires outbound network calls, which some environments block.
- Full-history scans on large repositories are slow.
- 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
Teams that want free, high-signal secret scanning in the pipeline today.
Any team that currently does no dynamic security testing at all.
All of these integrate with: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Docker, Jenkins.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.