Invicti vs. OWASP ZAP

Full-featured enterprise DAST vs. open-source manual scanner

Invicti is the leading commercial solution for dynamic application security testing (DAST), offering a full AppSec platform built around a vulnerability scanning engine that incorporates over two decades of expertise from the Acunetix and Netsparker scanners. Available both as a SaaS (cloud-based) and on-premises product, Invicti was built for integrated automation and accuracy at an enterprise scale in modern application and API environments. The core DAST engine is the centerpiece of a far larger toolset that includes website and API discovery, Predictive Risk Scoring, API security testing, outdated technology detection, IAST, SAST, static and dynamic SCA, and more. It also has its own vulnerability database to fingerprint and flag components with known vulnerabilities (CVEs) alongside running security checks to uncover application vulnerabilities like SQL injection, XSS, CSRF, and many more.

The Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) is an open-source manual web vulnerability scanner that started life as an OWASP project and has gone by several names, starting with OWASP ZAP, then plain ZAP, and from mid-2024 ZAP by Checkmarx. It is a popular tool among ethical hackers, security researchers, casual bounty hunters, and cybersecurity enthusiasts. This low price also makes it tempting for some organizations, but trying to use ZAP for anything else than ad-hoc manual testing inevitably ends in tears.

Open-source security tools like ZAP might not cost money to download, but free comes at the price of noisy results, limited coverage, and troublesome setup and integration. Limitations that may be acceptable for an ethical hacker or security enthusiast doing some manual testing can quickly grow into roadblocks in a corporate environment. Tempted by the low upfront cost, some organizations might think, “We just need a couple of scans, nothing fancy, let’s download this free tool and get some free scans.” In reality, the ostensibly free tool turns out to take weeks of highly paid work to set up and start running, more weeks to fine-tune, and countless hours down the road to manually check results for false positives.

Routinely using a manual tool like ZAP in any larger environment is simply not scalable, and the time to getting security value from it can be very long.

Proof-based scanning for accurate scans that cut false positives

As a dedicated tool built for accuracy, integration, and pipeline automation, the Invicti AppSec platform is a completely different proposition from a basic manual scanner. Automatic vulnerability confirmation (aka proof-based scanning) is used to safely exploit many types of vulnerabilities to prove they are real issues, deliver proof of the vulnerability, and provide developers with full technical details along with remediation guidance. Combined with a wide array of workflow integrations, this lets you send confirmed vulnerability reports directly to developers as tickets in their existing issue tracker without worrying about sending false positives—and without forcing your security team to verify each scan report before manually creating tickets for real issues.

ZAP is a Java tool built for manual testing and intended for users who have the time and skills to manually set up the scanner for a specific target and customize it to their personal needs. By design, it’s expected to overreport findings for further manual investigation, making it unsuitable for any type of automation without an extra verification step. As an open-source project, it is also not guaranteed to have the latest security checks expected from a commercial security solution, meaning it will miss many types of vulnerabilities or even be unable to scan certain types of sites or applications.

Simply put, it’s all about the time to fix a vulnerability in real-life application environments. With Invicti, you can go from scan to dev ticket to fix as quickly as your developers can handle the automated request. Trying to replicate the same process with ZAP could mean days of manual checking, reporting, explaining, and arguing—and that’s assuming it found the vulnerability in the first place.

Automated and authenticated vulnerability scanning across web apps and APIs

The idea behind the Invicti platform is to make application security testing an integral and automated part of both development and operations at any scale. The DAST scanner is the foundational element of a broader application security solution for scanning entire environments in a continuous process. To maximize test coverage, Invicti supports modern app and API authentication methods (including SSO) to run authenticated scans wherever necessary. 

With DAST providing tech-agnostic security testing coverage, the Invicti platform adds extensive support for API security testing (including REST, SOAP, GraphQL, and gRPC), static and dynamic software composition analysis, agent-based IAST for supported technologies, integration with SAST, web asset and API discovery, and more. When combined with workflow and tool integrations, Invicti becomes an integral part of your application security program and the software development lifecycle itself.

With a manual scanner tool like ZAP, you run a scan on a single site and that’s it—what comes before or after the scan is your problem. Again, this may be fine for the intended use case of a security expert performing manual testing, but it cannot be automated and becomes completely unworkable at any kind of larger scale. Scan authentication is a particular sticking point for open-source tools like ZAP, usually requiring user interaction to authenticate if the scanner is to access any restricted pages. And while it might seem that API security scanning is technically no different from web application scanning, testing API endpoints usually requires authentication and using specific request formats that ZAP might not directly support, requiring more manual tweaking. JavaScript-heavy single-page applications are another area where more basic scanners like ZAP can struggle to find and test all attack points without user intervention.

Vulnerability management, workflow integrations, reporting, and support

Systematic security testing in a continuous process, especially one integrated with the SDLC, requires efficient vulnerability management and reporting. When a vulnerability is found, it needs to be tracked across its entire lifetime, from initial report through remediation and retesting. If the same vulnerability is found again, it should be clear whether it’s the same unresolved item, an incomplete fix, or a new security issue (for instance, a different type of XSS vulnerability on the same page as a previously fixed cross-site scripting issue).

The Invicti platform provides all this and more, offering full-featured vulnerability management functionality as part of its centralized, user-friendly interface, alongside out-of-the-box integrations with industry-standard vulnerability management platforms and issue trackers. It also comes with an extensive internal API for fine-tuning integrations or building custom ones, not to mention a host of built-in and custom reports for compliance and security posture tracking. All provided with comprehensive customer onboarding and world-class technical support to help companies start seeing real value from the solution as quickly as possible—sometimes in a matter of days.

Manual tools for ad-hoc scanning, OWASP ZAP included, don’t have any of those features because being part of a systematic vulnerability management process is not what they are intended for. As a result, if you try to use them in any kind of automated workflow, you will be spending a lot of time either manually managing vulnerabilities or trying to build your own automation. The same goes for building reports—all you get is a scan result, but where to put it and how to present it is left for you to figure out.

In summary, Invicti and OWASP ZAP are two very different tools for different jobs. The open-source ZAP is a basic DAST engine with tools for manual testing of single targets. The Invicti platform is a full-scale application security solution built for automation and integration, centered around the industry’s best DAST.