What are the differences between Burp and OWASP ZAP?

It is true that both tools are in the same space. Burp is a commercial closed source tool (which can be extended) developed by a commercial company while ZAP is a free open source tool developed by the community.

Both have relative strengths and weaknesses, but as the ZAP project lead I'll let others enumerate those as I'm kind of biased.

Having 2 tools with overlapping functionality is (in my opinion) a good thing, and many security people chain ZAP and burp together to get the advantages of both.


I feel like this might largely be a question of UI preference, as I haven't found something I did in BurpCE that I really can't do in ZAP, and I would say that ZAP is more intuitive. Also, the tabs in Burp are super annoying, and can get unmanageable when you start to have a ton. There are definitely some rough patches in ZAP where doing something looks to be possible, but its just easier in Burp. I do find myself in ZAP more than BurpCE after really getting used to ZAP.

That being said, it seems like Burp's paid feature set is much more of a "Web Application Scanner", which devs can leave running somewhere and just let it scan and flag stuff, as opposed to ZAP, being a tool for web app vuln testing that has to actively be used by the end user.

Tags:

Burp Suite

Zap