OWASP ZAP

Why use it

ZAP is the closest free alternative to Burp Suite Professional. Active scanning, passive scanning, fuzzing, scripting, automation — it does the lot. Perfect for testing your own web apps and APIs.

What you get

• Active and passive web scanning
• Spider and AJAX spider for SPA crawling
• API/OpenAPI import for targeted scans
• Fuzzer for parameter testing
• Headless mode for CI integration

System requirements

Installation

Download from zaproxy.org/download/ for desktop. For CI use the Docker image: docker run -t owasp/zap2docker-stable zap-baseline.py -t https://target.com. The Quick Start tab in the GUI walks you through your first scan.

Suggested configuration

Always run the baseline scan first to catch low-hanging fruit before active scanning. Configure context to scope the scan correctly — ZAP will happily scan everything if you don't tell it not to. Use the API to integrate into CI as a quality gate.

Integration ideas

• Run in GitHub Actions / GitLab CI per PR
• Import findings into TheHive as cases
• Combine with Nuclei for templated CVE checks

Alternatives

• Burp Suite Community — Better intercept proxy UX; no active scanner in free tier.
• Nikto — Older signature scanner; far less coverage.