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 community edition updates services regularly. They add new vulnerabilities into the scanning list."
"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."
"It has evolved over the years and recently in the last year they have added, HUD (Heads Up Display)."
"The vulnerabilities that it finds, because the primary goal is to secure applications and websites."
"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."
"This solution has improved my organization because it has made us feel safer doing frequent deployments for web applications. If we have something really big, we might get some professional company in to help us but if we're releasing small products, we will check it ourselves with Zap. It makes it easier and safer."
"Two features are valuable. The first one is that the scan gets completed really quickly, and the second one is that even though it searches in a limited scope, what it does in that limited scope is very good. When you use Zap for testing, you're only using it for specific aspects or you're only looking for certain things. It works very well in that limited scope."
"Simple to use, good user interface."
"SonarQube is useful for controlling all of our Azure task tracking and scanning."
"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."
"Engineers have also learned from the results and have improved themselves as engineers. This will help them with their careers."
"I like the by-default policies that are they, as they seem to cover most of what I need."
"The reporting and the results are quick. It gets integrated within the pipeline well."
"I like that it's easy to navigate not just in terms of code findings but you can actually see them in the context of your source code because it gives you a copy of your code with the items that it found and highlights them. You can see it directly in your code, so you can easily go back and make the corrections in the code. It basically finds the problems for you and tells you where they are."
"The code coverage feature is very good."
"It is a very good tool for analysis and security vulnerability checking."
"Online documentation can be improved to utilize all features of ZAP and API methods to make use in automation."
"They stopped their support for a short period. They've recently started to come back again. In the early days, support was much better."
"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."
"Reporting format has no output, is cluttered and very long."
"I'd like to see a kind of feature where we can just track what our last vulnerability was and how it has improved or not. More reports that can have some kind of base-lining, I think that would be a good feature too. I'm not sure whether it can be achieved and implement but I think that would really help."
"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."
"OWASP Zap needs to extend to mobile application testing."
"Sometimes, we get some false positives."
"We also use Fortify, which is another tool to find security errors. Fortify is a better security tool. It is better than SonarQube in finding errors. Sometimes, SonarQube doesn't find some of the errors that Fortify is able to find. Fortify also has a community, which SonarQube doesn't have. Its installation is a little bit complex. We need to install a database, install the product, and specify the version of the database and the product. They can simplify the installation and make it easier. We use docker for the installation because it is easier to use. Its dashboard needs to be improved. It is not intuitive. It is hard to understand the interface, and it can be improved to provide a better user experience."
"SonarQube could improve by adding automatic creation of tasks after scanning and more support for the Czech language."
"Currently requires multiple tools, lacking one overall tool."
"The documentation is not clear and it needs to be updated."
"The exporting capabilities could be improved. Currently, exporting is fully dependent on the SonarQube environment."
"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."
"Monitoring is a feature that can be improved in the next version."
"It requires advanced heuristics to recognize more complex constructs that could be disregarded as issues."
OWASP Zap is ranked 7th in Static Application Security Testing (SAST) with 37 reviews while SonarQube is ranked 1st in Static Application Security Testing (SAST) with 112 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, Qualys Web Application Scanning, Veracode, PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional and Checkmarx One, whereas SonarQube is most compared with Checkmarx One, SonarCloud, Coverity, Veracode and GitLab. See our OWASP Zap vs. SonarQube report.
See our list of best Static Application Security Testing (SAST) vendors.
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