Greenbone Web App Scanning vs ZAP The Zed Attack Proxy: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)

Greenbone Web App Scanning

Mid-market and SMB security teams with manual remediation capacity should pick Greenbone Web App Scanning for its black-box testing approach that catches configuration and business logic flaws that signature-based scanners miss. The service includes manual validation of findings and proof-of-concept demonstrations, which cuts down on false positives and speeds developer triage. Skip this if your team expects fully automated remediation workflows or needs to scan APIs and microservices at scale; Greenbone's strength is in traditional web application coverage, not modern distributed architectures.

ZAP The Zed Attack Proxy

AppSec teams running continuous integration pipelines and developers who want to shift security left should start with ZAP The Zed Attack Proxy; it's free, integrates natively into CI/CD, and the 14,000+ GitHub stars reflect genuine adoption in resource-constrained shops. You'll catch common OWASP Top 10 issues in automated scans, but expect to pair it with manual testing and API-specific tools for complex authentication flows. Skip this if you need enterprise support contracts, out-of-the-box compliance reporting, or deep JavaScript framework analysis without significant tuning.