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OWASP Zap vs Qualys Web Application Scanning vs Veracode comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Static Application Security Testing (SAST) category, the mindshare of OWASP Zap is 3.1%, down from 5.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Qualys Web Application Scanning is 1.9%, down from 2.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Veracode is 4.9%, down from 9.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Veracode4.9%
Qualys Web Application Scanning1.9%
OWASP Zap3.1%
Other90.1%
Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
 

Featured Reviews

NK
Technical Analyst at Hexaware Technologies Limited
Open source testing tool empowers manual activities and has room to improve integration and reporting features
The improvement that has to be done for APIs focuses on manual activities where the feature exists, but it is not at the same level as what Burp Suite does with intercepting and tools such as Postman, so it needs improvement. There are limitations with authentication levels, particularly with form-based and cookie-based authentication. However, overall, we are satisfied with OWASP Zap as there are no major issues, and improving the scan engine could be beneficial. When comparing OWASP Zap and Burp Suite, the main difference besides pricing is that OWASP Zap has limitations with reporting levels and UI, which affects its reporting capabilities, whereas Burp Suite is already advancing with new AI features and scanning capabilities that OWASP Zap seems to be lacking.
AnkitSharma13 - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Officer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Web scanning needs improvement but offers good vulnerability detection
The downside of Qualys Web Application Scanning is that it cannot crawl automatically. If I provide an IP address and a login form, it does basic testing, but it doesn't go deep as IBM AppScan does. If Qualys Web Application Scanning could improve its crawling capability, it would be more user-friendly. Qualys Web Application Scanning does IP-level testing, requiring direct input of credentials, and can only scan a few pages to provide known generic vulnerabilities, which isn't as beneficial from my point of view. The Vulnerability Management also relies heavily on version numbers and will flag vulnerabilities based on the component version, but it doesn't check if a real fix exists, leading to flags on components that actually have workarounds available.
reviewer2703864 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Security Architecture at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Onboarding developers successfully while improving code security through IDE integration
Regarding room for improvement, we have some problems when onboarding new projects because the build process has to be done in a certain way, as Veracode analyzes the binaries and not the code by itself alone. If the process is not configured correctly, it doesn't work. That's one of the things that we are discussing with Veracode. Something positive that we've been able to do is submit formal feature requests to them, and they are working on them; they've already solved some of them. This encourages us to propose new ideas and improvements. Another improvement that we asked for this use case is to be able to configure how Veracode Fix proposes and fixes because sometimes it makes proposals using libraries that go against our architecture design made by the enterprise architecture team. For example, we want them to propose using another library, and that's something we already asked Veracode, and they are working on it. We want to specify when you see this kind of vulnerability, you can only propose these two options.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The pull request analysis is also very good."
"OWASP is definitely in the top three as a tool that we would probably recommend to our team, as a frequent users' tool, however, I don't believe we have any kind of a formal relationship with the company."
"OWASP is quite matured in identifying the vulnerabilities."
"The solution has tightened our security and that of our clients who depend on it."
"You can run it against multiple targets."
"The solution is good at reporting the vulnerabilities of the application."
"The scalability of this product is very good."
"Fuzzer and Java APIs help a lot with our custom needs."
"​QualysGuard web-based scanner is very useful for performing external penetration and PCI scans from remote locations.​"
"WAS gave us visibility into our externally exposed web applications and showed us vulnerabilities that we were not aware of and did not know how to test for."
"The Qualys Web Application Scanning solution offers a single comprehensive console and consolidated reporting, covering all aspects from on-prem to cloud and compliance, etcetera."
"The Qualys Web Application Scanning solution offers a single comprehensive console and consolidated reporting, covering all aspects from on-prem to cloud and compliance, etcetera."
"Qualys Web Application Scanning is robust and mature from industry standards."
"Technical support is very good whenever we send them a message."
"The features of Qualys Web Application Scanning are impressive as the scan is faster and gets completed quickly, the dashboards look great, the option for scheduled scans makes it fully automated, and customizable reports can be downloaded anytime in CSV, PDF, or whichever format required."
"Qualys Web Application Scanning is very stable and reliable."
"The reporting being highly accurate is pretty cool. I use another product and I was always looking for answers as to what line, which part of the code, was wrong, and what to do about it. Veracode seems to have a solid database to look things up and a website to look things up."
"Integrations into our developer's IDE (Greenlight) and the DevOps Pipeline SAST / SourceClear Integrations has particularly increased our time to market and confidence."
"To me, the principal feature is the CLI (command-line interface) because I put together a lot of implementations using it. Another important aspect is the low false-positive rate because the solution is very configurable. It is as low as 1 percent and that is a huge difference compared to competitors."
"The visibility into application status helps reduce risk exposure for our software. Today, any findings provided by the DAST are reviewed by the developers and we have internal processes in place to correct those findings before there can be a release. So it absolutely does prevent us from releasing weak code."
"The time savings has been tremendous."
"Vulnerability Management and mitigation recommendations help with resolution of issues found, prior to deployment to production."
"It scans for the OWASP top-10 security flaws at the dynamic level and, at the static level, it scans for all the warnings so that developers can fix the code before we go to UAT or the next phase."
"When we expanded our definition of critical systems to include an internal application to be scanned by Veracode, we had initial scans that produced hundreds of vulnerabilities. We expected this, based on how the code was treated previously, but the Veracode platform allowed us to streamline our identification of these items and develop a game plan to quickly address them."
 

Cons

"The product should allow users to customize the report based on their needs."
"If there was an easier to understand exactly what has been checked and what has not been checked, it would make this solution better. We have to trust that it has checked all known vulnerabilities but it's a bit hard to see after the scanning."
"If there was an easier way to understand exactly what has been checked and what has not been checked, it would make this solution better."
"The solution is somewhat unreliable because after we get the finding, we have to manually verify each of its findings to see whether it's a false positive or a true finding, and it takes time."
"The product reporting could be improved."
"The forced browse has been incorporated into the program and it is resource-intensive."
"I would recommend this product to people although I think it is very difficult to deploy and we also have issues with maintenance."
"We get too many false positives and that should definitely be improved."
"There should be better visibility into the application."
"There should be better visibility into the application."
"It should have better automatic reporting."
"It's missing some zero-day patches."
"The GUI could be a little less complicated as it opens a lot of new windows for creating search lists, templates, reports, or for scanning purposes."
"I would like it to be cheaper because it is a bit expensive compared to competitors like Tenable Nessus."
"The tool should have a live HTTP editor and more configuration options for some situations, such as handling applications that have URL rewriting enabled."
"There could be better management and faster scanning."
"The scans were sometimes not accurate in version 2022. There were some false positives in the vulnerability reports. We used to get false positives, and we were responsible for checking all of the alerts and determining whether they were true positives or false positives. They might have already improved it. If they have not, they can look into how to mitigate false positives."
"Veracode needs to improve its integration with other tools."
"In the next release, I would like a proper way of packaging files for scanning and the packing of IOS apps and API Dynamic scan methodology."
"It's taking too much time to do a quality scan."
"I would ask Veracode to be a lot more engaged with the customer and set up live sessions where they force the customer to engage with Veracode's technical team. Veracode could show them a repo, how they should do things, this is what these results mean, here is a dashboard, here's the interpretation, here's where you find the results."
"Their platform is not consistent. It needs a lot of user experience updates. It's slow performing, and they log you out of the system every 15 minutes, so using the platform is challenging from a developer's perspective because you always have to log in."
"Veracode would benefit greatly from more training resources. The videos are great, but I would like more hands-on training writing a script, validating a script with a unit test in a different language, etc. That's something that would be very valuable."
"Veracode does not support scans for .NET Blazor server applications."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This solution is open source and free."
"It's free. It's good for us because we don't know what the extent of our use will be yet. It's good to start with something free and easy to use."
"OWASP Zap is free to use."
"OWASP ZAP is a free tool provided by OWASP’s engineers and experts. There is an option to donate."
"We have used the freeware version. I believe Zap only has freeware."
"It's free and open, currently under the Apache 2 license. If ZAP does what you need it to do, selling a free solution is a very easy."
"This app is completely free and open source. So there is no question about any pricing."
"This is an open-source solution and can be used free of charge."
"Qualys WAS' pricing is competitive."
"​It is best to be an institutional buyer and directly contact the sales team, as they can provide over-the-top discounts for bulk orders​."
"I rate the software’s pricing a six out of ten."
"Qualys Web Application Scanning's pricing is a bit expensive compared to other solutions available in the market."
"There are different options available with respect to licensing."
"Qualys has an IT-based licensing based on a yearly license, which is a good way of handling it. However, in some cases, when we do the PCI scanning, the host will not like the scanning and we lose the IT license. So, this could be improved."
"From my perspective, it is a budget-friendly option."
"Try the free trial of the product to understand the basic working mechanisms.​"
"Veracode has been fair. We use their SaaS solution and it's just an annual subscription."
"The pricing and licensing are reasonable, and relatively straightforward, and different licensing and subscription models are available."
"If you're licensing, and you're looking at licensing models, you might want to ask Veracode about their microservice, depending on the company. If you are a microservice architecture, I would suggest asking them about their microservice pricing. I would suggest that you evaluate that with your code and their other licensing model, which is like a lump sum in size of artifacts, and just make sure that you price that out with them, because there might be some tradeoffs that can be made in price."
"When I looked at the pricing, it was definitely a value. In terms of the service and what it's checking, the cost was very reasonable, particularly because we could have multiple code bases as part of a project."
"Pricing seems fair for what is offered, and licensing has been no problem. All developers are able to get the access they need."
"Depending on the number of users, my company makes payments toward the solution's licensing costs."
"I wouldn't really recommend Veracode for a small firm, because it might be a little pricey for them. But for a large organization, with more than 1,000 applications in the enterprise, there are tiered levels of pricing."
"The Veracode price model is based on application profiles, which is how you package your components for scanning."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
University
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise21
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise27
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business69
Midsize Enterprise45
Large Enterprise114
 

Questions from the Community

Is OWASP Zap better than PortSwigger Burp Suite Pro?
OWASP Zap and PortSwigger Burp Suite Pro have many similar features. OWASP Zap has web application scanning available...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for OWASP Zap?
OWASP might be cost-effective, however, people prefer to use the free edition available as open source.
What needs improvement with OWASP Zap?
The improvement that has to be done for APIs focuses on manual activities where the feature exists, but it is not at ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Qualys Web Application Scanning?
Regarding pricing, I think for personal use, it is costly, but if organizations are ready to pay, then it is fine as ...
What needs improvement with Qualys Web Application Scanning?
The downside of Qualys Web Application Scanning is that it cannot crawl automatically. If I provide an IP address and...
What is your primary use case for Qualys Web Application Scanning?
I use Qualys Web Application Scanning, and we are using Vulnerability Management. By Vulnerability Management, I mean...
Which gives you more for your money - SonarQube or Veracode?
SonarQube is easy to deploy and configure, and also integrates well with other tools to do quality code analysis. Son...
What do you like most about Veracode Static Analysis?
I like its integration with GitHub. I like using it from GitHub. I can use the GitHub URL and find out the vulnerabil...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Veracode Static Analysis?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Veracode is that it is fairly moderate.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Qualys WAS
Crashtest Security , Veracode Detect
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

1. Google 2. Microsoft 3. IBM 4. Amazon 5. Facebook 6. Twitter 7. LinkedIn 8. Netflix 9. Adobe 10. PayPal 11. Salesforce 12. Cisco 13. Oracle 14. Intel 15. HP 16. Dell 17. VMware 18. Symantec 19. McAfee 20. Citrix 21. Red Hat 22. Juniper Networks 23. SAP 24. Accenture 25. Deloitte 26. Ernst & Young 27. PwC 28. KPMG 29. Capgemini 30. Infosys 31. Wipro 32. TCS
BskyB, Cartagena, ClearPoint Learning Systems, Connect Group, du, Fortrex Technologies, HBOR, HDI, Highlights for Children, The Lithuanian State Enterprise Centre of Registers, City of Miami Beach, Microsoft, MidlandHR, MSCI Inc., Northern Arizona University, Ofgem, Olympus Europa, PhoneFactor, RTL Nederland, ThousandEyes, VGZ Organisatie B.V.
Manhattan Associates, Azalea Health, Sabre, QAD, Floor & Decor, Prophecy International, SchoolCNXT, Keap, Rekner, Cox Automotive, Automation Anywhere, State of Missouri and others.
Find out what your peers are saying about SonarSource Sàrl, Checkmarx, Veracode and others in Static Application Security Testing (SAST). Updated: April 2026.
892,383 professionals have used our research since 2012.