The Enterprise and Developer Friendly Alternative to Zap

StackHawk delivers the proven vulnerability detection of OWASP ZAP baked into a complete CI/CD-native platform, including 3-5x faster scans with guaranteed scope control, automated integration across all major pipelines, developer-friendly workflows, and enterprise security features. Scale security testing across your organization with no engineering investment required.

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Why Choose StackHawk Over OWASP ZAP?

Although StackHawk is so much more than basic testing, our HawkScan Test Engine (HSTE) was originally built on ZAP’s proven vulnerability detection foundation. ZAP is an incredible, community-supported tool, and we’re proud of that lineage. However, as of version 4.0, HSTE has been completely re-engineered— it’s not just a configuration layer, but a container-first, cloud-native platform purpose-built for modern development teams. StackHawk delivers ZAP’s industry-standard scanning enhanced by a purpose-built platform for modern DevSecOps, including optimized performance, automated CI/CD integration, developer-friendly workflows, and enterprise support so your team can focus on building applications, not building security infrastructure.

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The Build vs. Buy Decision for AppSec Tools

StackHawk wraps ZAP’s proven scanning engine in a complete SaaS platform, providing 3-5x faster scans, guaranteed scope control, YAML-based configuration, automated CI/CD integration across all major platforms, and enterprise support. Your team implements security testing in days, not months, without diverting engineering resources from product development.

OWASP ZAP is an excellent open-source scanner that’s become the industry standard for DAST—and it’s the foundation StackHawk is built on. However, integrating ZAP into modern CI/CD pipelines requires significant engineering investment: 2-4 weeks initial setup per application, performance optimization to prevent pipeline timeouts, custom scripting for automation, complex authentication configuration prone to failures, and 1-2 FTE security engineers for ongoing maintenance ($200-400K annually). Teams must choose whether building this infrastructure is their best use of engineering time.

CI/CD Native from Day One

StackHawk provides native integrations with all major CI/CD platforms out of the box, allowing it to actually run within your pipeline infrastructure and make security testing part of the CI/CD workflow. It delivers 3-5x faster scans than vanilla ZAP with guaranteed scope control and no more horror stories about runaway scans attacking production systems. Configure scanning with version-controlled YAML files, deploy via Docker to scan anywhere, and deliver results directly to developers in PR comments. Security testing runs automatically on every build in minutes, not hours.

OWASP ZAP requires teams to build their own CI/CD integration layer: custom automation scripts for triggering scans, performance tuning to fit build windows (scans often exceed pipeline timeouts), parsing and normalizing results, implementing pass/fail logic, managing finding state across builds, and preventing scope issues. While technically achievable, this represents weeks or months of engineering effort plus ongoing maintenance as pipelines and tools evolve.

Enterprise Security & Compliance Built-In

StackHawk is more than a scanner; it includes essential features for enterprise adoption and compliance requirements like SOC 2, HIPAA, and PCI. This includes SSO/SAML with automated provisioning, role-based access control, audit logging, centralized vulnerability management across teams, historical trending and analytics, and professional support with SLAs. Our hybrid model keeps scanning local while results stream to a centralized platform for unified oversight, bridging the gap between developers who fix and AppSec teams who manage.

OWASP ZAP is a desktop application with no authentication management, no compliance framework, no audit logging, and no enterprise controls. Teams must build all governance and reporting capabilities themselves. There’s no centralized management for multi-team environments, no way to track security posture across application portfolios, and no professional support when production issues arise at 2 AM—just community forums.

Business Logic and Custom Vulnerability Testing

StackHawk goes beyond standard OWASP testing with Custom Test Scripts and business logic vulnerability detection that understands your application’s unique workflows and rules. Test complex multi-step processes, validate that admin functions remain inaccessible through indirect API calls, and catch privilege escalation vulnerabilities specific to your business logic.

OWASP ZAP focuses on generic vulnerability detection patterns from the OWASP Top 10. While its community add-ons provide some customization, ZAP cannot understand application-specific business rules, validate complex workflow logic, or test for privilege escalation scenarios unique to your application.

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ZAP vs StackHawk Feature Comparison Guide

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Features

StackHawk

ZAP

Developer Experience

Actionable vulnerability feedback integrated into every pull request with clear remediation steps that fit developer workflows

Basic HTML/XML/JSON reports generated after scans complete, requiring manual review and interpretation by developers, with limited integration into developer tools and workflows

API Discovery

Source code-driven discovery finds internal and public-facing APIs before deployment, preventing exposure

No automatic discovery or source code analysis

API Security Testing

Comprehensive testing for all API types: REST, SOAP, GraphQL, and gRPC

Scans REST, SOAP, and GraphQL testing through specialized add-ons and scan scripts, but requires different configurations and approaches for each API type

CI/CD Integration

Native pipeline integration across all major platforms with scans that complete within standard build times

Docker-based integration possible but requires significant configuration

Business Logic Testing

Deterministic tests support detection of complex business logic flaws with full transparency and customization

Requires manual script development and lacks built-in business logic vulnerability detection capabilities

Frequently Asked Questions About StackHawk and Zap

Is StackHawk just a commercialized ZAP?

StackHawk’s HawkScan Test Engine (HSTE) represents a complete re-engineering of ZAP’s foundation for CI/CD environments. Over the past several years, we have supported the ZAP community while rebuilding our core test engine as a container-first, cloud-native platform with API-first architecture, Java 17 optimizations, and native ARM64/AMD64 support.. What we share with ZAP is the community-loved proven vulnerability detection. What we’ve built is everything required to operationalize that detection in modern development: 3-5x performance improvements, guaranteed scope control preventing runaway scans, YAML configuration replacing multiple XML files, native CI/CD integration, and enterprise security features that ZAP’s desktop architecture cannot support.

What engineering investment does ZAP require for CI/CD automation?

Integrating ZAP into CI/CD pipelines requires building automation frameworks for triggering scans, optimizing scan performance to fit build windows, parsing and normalizing results, implementing pass/fail logic, managing finding state across builds, creating configuration management systems, integrating with developer tools, and maintaining all of this infrastructure as pipelines evolve. Based on customer feedback from teams that have migrated from ZAP to StackHawk, it typically requires 2-6 months of engineering time for an initial implementation, not to mention ongoing maintenance. StackHawk delivers this functionality out of the box.

Does StackHawk provide better scanning than ZAP?

StackHawk uses ZAP’s scanning engine at its core, so the vulnerability detection is fundamentally the same proven technology. What differs is performance—our HSTE delivers 3-5x faster scans with guaranteed scope control—and the complete platform around that scanning. We’ve added technology flags that automatically scope tests to relevant architecture, reducing scan times and false positives. The value isn’t “better detection,” it’s optimized performance, automated integration, developer-friendly workflows, and enterprise features without the engineering investment required to build these capabilities around ZAP.

When does it make sense to use ZAP versus StackHawk?

ZAP remains excellent for manual penetration testing, security research, and one-off assessments where security professionals need deep customization and control. Many of our customers use both: ZAP for exploratory security work and StackHawk for automated CI/CD testing at scale. The tools serve different use cases. ZAP excels at manual investigation by security experts, while StackHawk enables continuous automated protection integrated into developer workflows. If your team ships code daily and needs security testing that keeps pace, StackHawk is purpose-built for that.

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