We compared SonarQube and OWASP Zap based on our user's reviews in several parameters.
SonarQube and OWASP Zap both provide valuable features for detecting vulnerabilities and enhancing code security. SonarQube stands out for its comprehensive features, versatile language support, and seamless DevOps integration, while OWASP Zap is praised for its robust scanning capabilities and user-friendly interface. SonarQube offers strong customer service and positive ROI, while OWASP Zap is commended for its responsive support and affordable pricing. Areas for improvement include analysis speed for SonarQube and tool performance for OWASP Zap.
Features: SonarQube stands out for its support for multiple languages, integration with DevOps pipelines, ability to detect vulnerabilities, and usability enhancements. In contrast, OWASP Zap is praised for its robust scanning capabilities, effective interception and proxying features, comprehensive reporting options, ease of use, user-friendly interface, and strong community support.
Pricing and ROI: The setup cost for SonarQube is considered straightforward and easy, with users appreciating the simplicity of the process. On the other hand, OWASP Zap's setup cost is minimal and hassle-free, allowing for quick and easy installation., SonarQube has proven highly beneficial for ROI, improving code quality, fixing issues, enhancing project efficiency, and detecting vulnerabilities. OWASP Zap provides enhanced security measures, risk mitigation, and user-friendly flexibility.
Room for Improvement: SonarQube's room for improvement lies in enhancing analysis speed, refining UI for navigation, providing clearer setup instructions and advanced functionality documentation, addressing occasional performance issues, and improving integration options. On the other hand, OWASP Zap needs improvements in tool speed and performance, user interface usability, documentation clarity, tool stability, advanced features and customization options, and reporting capabilities.
Deployment and customer support: Users mentioned that it took them three months for deployment and an additional week for setup with SonarQube, while OWASP Zap users had varying timeframes. SonarQube's deployment and setup durations are longer compared to OWASP Zap., SonarQube is commended for its exceptional customer service, with prompt and knowledgeable assistance. Users express confidence in the reliability of its support. OWASP Zap's customer service is also highly praised, with helpful and responsive staff who ensure a positive user experience.
The summary above is based on 47 interviews we conducted recently with SonarQube and OWASP Zap users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"The vulnerabilities that it finds, because the primary goal is to secure applications and websites."
"The community edition updates services regularly. They add new vulnerabilities into the scanning list."
"The best feature is the Zap HUD (Heads Up Display) because the customers can use the website normally. If we scan websites with automatic scanning, and the website has a web application firewall, it's very difficult."
"The scalability of this product is very good."
"It's great that we can use it with Portswigger Burp."
"We use the solution for security testing."
"Simple and easy to learn and master."
"It can be used effectively for internal auditing."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is that it is free."
"There's plenty of documentation available to users."
"The static code analysis of the solution is the most important aspect for us. When it comes to security breaches within the code, we can leverage some rules to allow us to identify the repetition in our code and the possible targets that we may have. It makes it very easy to review our code for security purposes."
"It is a very good tool for analysis despite its limitations."
"The depth features I have found most valuable. You receive a quick comprehensive comparison overview regarding the current release and the last release and what type of depths dependency or duplication should be used. This is going to help you to make a more readable code and have more flexibility for the engineers to understand how things should work when they do not know."
"It provides the security that is required from a solution for financial businesses."
"I follow Quality Gate's graduation model within organization, and it is extremely helpful for me to benchmark products."
"The most valuable features are that it is user-friendly, easy to access, and they provide good training files."
"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."
"The forced browse has been incorporated into the program and it is resource-intensive."
"The reporting feature could be more descriptive."
"Reporting format has no output, is cluttered and very long."
"The work that it does in the limited scope is good, but the scope is very limited in terms of the scanning features. The number of things it tests or finds is limited. They need to make it a more of a mainstream tool that people can use, and they can even think about having it on a proprietary basis. They need to increase the coverage of the scan and the results that it finds. That has always been Zap's limitation. Zap is a very good tool for a beginner, but once you start moving up the ladder where you want further details and you want your scan to show more in-depth results, Zap falls short because its coverage falls short. It does not have the capacity to do more."
"ZAP's integration with cloud-based CICD pipelines could be better. The scan should run through the entire pipeline."
"It needs more robust reporting tools."
"The port scanner is a little too slow."
"The interface could be a little better and should be enhanced."
"We did have some trouble with the LDAP integration for the console."
"The product needs to integrate other security tools for security scanning."
"I think the code security can be improved."
"There is no automation. You need to put the code there and test. You then pull the results and put them back in the development environment. There is no integration with the development environment. We would like it to be integrated with our development environment, which is basically the CI/CD pipeline or the IDE that we have."
"We called support and complained but have not received any information as we use the free version. We had to fix it on our own and could not escalate it to the tool's developer."
"From a reporting perspective, we sometimes have problems interpreting the vulnerability scan reports. For example, if it finds a possible threat, our analysts have to manually check the provided reports, and sometimes we have issues getting all the data needed to properly verify if it's accurate or not."
"It does not provide deeper scanning of vulnerabilities in an application, on a live session. This is something we are not happy about. Maybe the reason for that is we are running the community edition currently, but other editions may improve on that aspect."
OWASP Zap is ranked 8th in Application Security Testing (AST) with 37 reviews while SonarQube is ranked 1st in Application Security Testing (AST) with 108 reviews. OWASP Zap is rated 7.6, while SonarQube is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of OWASP Zap writes "Great for automating and testing and has tightened our security ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SonarQube writes "Easy to integrate and has a plug-in that supports both C and C++ languages". OWASP Zap is most compared with Acunetix, PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional, Qualys Web Application Scanning, Veracode and Checkmarx One, whereas SonarQube is most compared with Checkmarx One, SonarCloud, Coverity, Veracode and Mend.io. See our OWASP Zap vs. SonarQube report.
See our list of best Application Security Testing (AST) vendors.
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