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OWASP Zap vs SonarQube comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

OWASP Zap
Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
15th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
41
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SonarQube
Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
1st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
139
Ranking in other categories
Application Security Tools (1st), Software Development Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Static Application Security Testing (SAST) category, the mindshare of OWASP Zap is 2.5%, down from 4.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SonarQube is 12.6%, down from 21.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SonarQube12.6%
OWASP Zap2.5%
Other84.9%
Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
 

Featured Reviews

Amit Beniwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at Al Hassan LLC
Simplifies vulnerability discovery and has high quality support
There are areas for improvement with OWASP Zap, particularly in the alignment of vulnerabilities concerning CVSS scores. Sometimes, a vulnerability initially categorized as high severity may be reduced to medium or low over time after security patches are applied. This alignment with the present severity score and CVSS score could be improved.
Vitthal Gole - PeerSpot reviewer
Devops Engineer at AIQOD
Automated code checks have improved quality gates and prevent weak code from reaching production
SonarQube could improve by reducing false positives in its static code analysis; while its detection capabilities are strong, some findings require manual verification, increasing developers' workload. More accurate analysis would enhance productivity, and SonarQube would benefit from enhanced AI-powered recommendations for fixing issues. For instance, in our pipeline, if it fails during SonarQube stage, we could check the dashboard for identified issues involving code smells, bugs, or duplicacy. An AI feature should be integrated into SonarQube to resolve issues quickly; optimizing scanning performance for very large repositories and providing faster analysis times would enhance the developer experience, especially in large code bases with frequent commits. For anyone planning to implement SonarQube, I advise starting by defining coding standards first and integrating Quality Gates into the pipeline. You can customize quality profiles to match project requirements; rather than relying entirely on default rules, you can adjust settings for stronger detection and enforcement. Organizations with advanced security, branch analysis, and governance features might consider commercial editions based on their needs.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This solution is providing us with value and as long as it continues to do so, we'll continue to use it."
"Simple and easy to learn and master."
"Simple to use, good user interface."
"The reporting is quite intuitive, which gives you a clear indication of what kind of vulnerability you have that you can drill down on to gather more information."
"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."
"The automatic scanning is a valuable feature and very easy, and the major advantage to this solution is the privacy it offers."
"Fuzzer and Java APIs help a lot with our custom needs."
"It's great that we can use it with Portswigger Burp."
"I'm not implementing the solutions. However, I've talked to the people who deploy the tools, and they are happy with how easy setting up SonarCloud is."
"A specific outcome I can share is that after integrating SonarQube into our CI/CD pipeline, we reduced production bugs by 30 to 40 percent and improved code coverage from 65 to 85 percent by enforcing the Quality Gate, along with a 25 percent reduction in technical debt over the last six to seven months post-implementation."
"Can tweak rules and feed them into our build pipelines."
"Using SonarQube benefits us because we are able to avoid the inclusion of malware in our applications."
"If code coverage is a low number then that's of great value to me."
"Engineers have also learned from the results and have improved themselves as engineers. This will help them with their careers."
"I would recommend SonarQube to other users as it is a good solution and the security issues we experienced are being fixed."
"SonarQube's unit test coverage and exhaustive information at the module, project, and overall code repo levels are quite good."
 

Cons

"Deployment is somewhat complicated."
"Without any support, we are in a black hole sometimes."
"The computers perform somewhat slowly when loading a large number of queries into memory."
"I'd also like to see an improvement in test reports because we get too many false positives."
"OWASP Zap needs to extend to mobile application testing."
"The documentation needs to be improved because I had to learn everything from watching YouTube videos."
"The technical support team must be proactive."
"There isn't too much information about it online."
"I need a solution that can bring together three key areas: vulnerabilities, static scanning, and misarchitecture. Currently, to achieve our expectations, we have to use more than one product, as some products excel at scanning for vulnerabilities but are poor at checking code quality."
"The worst about this tool I think is the upgrade method, and it's really easy to wreck the database when upgrading."
"A robust credential scanner would be a huge bonus as it would remove the need for yet another niche product with additional cost, also gives the benefit of a single pane of glass view, although we still need WhiteSource Bolt for third-party library scanning."
"It should be user-friendly."
"The scanning part could be improved in SonarQube. We have used Coverity for scanning, and we have the critical issues reported by Coverity; when we used SonarQube for scanning and looked at the results, it seems that some of them have incorrect input, and this part can be improved for C and C++ languages."
"Depending on the tool's configuration, sometimes you get false alarms that are unimportant to you."
"New plug-ins should be integrated into SonarCloud to give more flexibility to the product."
"The reporting can be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This solution is open source and free."
"We have used the freeware version. I believe Zap only has freeware."
"OWASP ZAP is a free tool provided by OWASP’s engineers and experts. There is an option to donate."
"The tool is open source."
"It is highly recommended as it is an open source tool."
"As Zap is free and open-source, with tons of features similar to those of commercial solutions, I would definitely recommend trying it out."
"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 is an open-source solution and can be used free of charge."
"We are using the free, unlicensed version."
"I was using the Community Edition, which is available free of charge."
"SonarQube price is a little bit higher than Kiuwan's. Kiuwan also gives a little bit of flexibility in terms of pricing."
"I rate the pricing a five out of ten."
"We are using the open-source version, which is available free of cost."
"The licence is standard open source licensing"
"A low cost long-term solution for non-critical situations."
"I am satisfied with the pricing."
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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Static Application Security Testing (SAST) solutions are best for your needs.
917,433 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
9%
University
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise22
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business45
Midsize Enterprise25
Large Enterprise81
 

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 with basic security vulnerabilities while Burp Suite Pro has it available with ...
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 the same level as what Burp Suite does with intercepting and tools such as Postm...
Is SonarQube the best tool for static analysis?
I am not very familiar with SonarQube and their solutions, so I can not answer. But if you are asking me about which tools that are the best for for Static Code Analysis, I suggest you have a look...
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. SonarQube has a great community edition, which is open-source and free. Easy to use...
How would you decide between Coverity and Sonarqube?
We researched Coverity, but in the end, we chose SonarQube. SonarQube is a tool for reviewing code quality and security. It helps to guide our development teams during code reviews by providing rem...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Sonar, SonarQube Cloud
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

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
Snowflake, Booking.com, Deutsche Bank, AstraZeneca, and Ford Motor Company.
Find out what your peers are saying about OWASP Zap vs. SonarQube and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
917,433 professionals have used our research since 2012.