Veracode 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
Quote on request
Quote onlyFree and open source
Open sourceWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Enterprise annual subscriptions priced by application count and scan types.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Free tier
No free tier.
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
Apache-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Veracode · since 2006
Category standard
Checkmarx / OWASP · since 2010
Strengths
- 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.
- 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
- Slow feedback compared with developer-first tools — poor fit for per-commit scanning.
- Expensive per application.
- Developer experience lags Snyk and Semgrep considerably.
- 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
Regulated enterprises needing formal security attestation, including for supplier software.
Any team that currently does no dynamic security testing at all.
All of these integrate with: Jenkins.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.