Burp Suite Professional vs mitmproxy: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
Burp Suite Professional is a commercial penetration testing tool by PortSwigger Ltd.. mitmproxy is a free penetration testing tool. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best penetration testing fit for your security stack.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of NIST CSF 2.0 coverage, company size fit, deployment model, here is our conclusion:
Security teams responsible for web application penetration testing will get the most from Burp Suite Professional because its manual testing workflow is genuinely faster than competitors when you need to find logic flaws and authentication bypasses that automated scanners miss. The platform covers ID.RA and PR.PS functions across both on-premises and cloud deployments, and PortSwigger's 299-person team maintains the strongest passive scanning library in the category. Skip this if your team lacks dedicated web security engineers or if you need a tool that also handles API fuzzing and mobile testing equally well; Burp's mobile support lags, and the learning curve punishes casual users.
Security researchers and penetration testers embedded in application security workflows should use mitmproxy for intercepting and inspecting encrypted web traffic at scale; its free, open-source model and 42,681 GitHub stars reflect sustained adoption among practitioners who need visibility into HTTP/2 and WebSocket traffic without vendor licensing constraints. The console interface makes request/response manipulation faster than GUI-only proxies once you accept the learning curve. Skip this if your team needs centralized policy enforcement or audit logging for compliance; mitmproxy is a hacker's workbench, not a gateway appliance.
