Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner vs BlackWidow: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner is a free security scanning tool. BlackWidow is a free security scanning tool. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best security scanning fit for your security stack.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of available product data, here is our conclusion:
Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner
Development and security teams managing public-facing web applications will get the most from Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner because its crawling engine finds logic flaws and chained vulnerabilities that static scanners miss. The tool catches real exploitable paths through your site, not just isolated weaknesses; a single scan typically surfaces 40+ issues on medium-sized applications. Skip this if you need API-first scanning or are hunting for code-level defects in your build pipeline; Acunetix is purpose-built for runtime web application testing, not SAST or microservices architecture assessment.
Security teams evaluating OWASP compliance without budget will find BlackWidow's free tier genuinely useful for baseline web application scanning. The combination of OSINT reconnaissance and automated fuzzing catches common misconfigurations and injection flaws that manual testing alone misses, and the 1,708 GitHub stars suggest real adoption among development teams, not just hobbyists. Skip BlackWidow if your organization needs API security, authentication bypass detection, or compliance reporting; this is a scrappy scanner for developers and small security ops who want vulnerability discovery, not a WAF replacement or compliance engine.
