4 MIN READ
Burp Suite has owned the application security testing market for 15 years. The interesting question in 2026 is whether that is finally changing. PortSwigger still leads the category, with the Professional edition at $449 per user per year, the Enterprise edition at custom pricing, and the alternatives have closed the gap. OWASP ZAP is free, Caido is the new commercial entrant, and the AI powered tools (XBOW, PentestGPT, Horizon3) are starting to automate the parts of the workflow that used to be manual.
What the new entrants are betting on. ZAP has been around for years, but the 2.16 release in 2025 added the AJAX spider, the GraphQL support, and the auth handling that used to send appsec engineers back to Burp. Caido is the cleaner story: built for the browser, designed for the cloud, and shipped with team collaboration that PortSwigger still does not match. The AI powered tools are the more interesting bet, because they go after the part of the workflow that PortSwigger has not really automated, which is the bit where a human reads the HTTP traffic, recognises the pattern, and decides what to test next. XBOW found real bugs in well known targets during 2025, and PentestGPT is being used by appsec consultancies to cut the manual time on a standard engagement by 40 to 60 percent.
What Burp is actually good at
The proxy sits at the heart of it, and has done for 15 years. A pentester points Burp at the browser, intercepts every request, modifies the parameters in flight, and watches what the application does. No competitor has matched that part, because building the proxy is unglamorous work and the moat lives in the edge cases (websocket handling, HTTP/2, gRPC, the long tail of weird authentication flows that real applications use). The scanner ranks as the second strength: solid coverage of the OWASP Top 10, the common XSS and SQLi patterns, the IDOR and SSRF that show up in most applications. The extension library rounds out the package. BApp Store carries more than 400 extensions covering everything from JWT testing to custom authentication flows, and most of them do not have a direct competitor anywhere.
What the alternatives have closed
ZAP fits the budget constrained engagement, and the 2025 release closed most of the feature gap with Burp Community. The scanner runs slower but the coverage holds, the proxy works, and the GraphQL support finally landed. An appsec org that picks ZAP because money is the actual constraint will not be embarrassed by the choice. Caido fits the org that wants a modern experience: the browser based UI runs faster than the Java client, the team collaboration features work as advertised, and the AI powered suggestions in the scanner save real time on standard workflows. The AI tools fit the engagement where volume caps the capacity, and they automate the part of the workflow that takes the most time on a large scale test. That part, where a human triages the alerts and decides what to chase, is what the AI tools make disappear.
What to actually choose
Pick the tool that fits the appsec org. An appsec lead who has been on Burp for years and has the muscle memory should stay on Burp. Switching costs are real, and the productivity loss in the first six months will eat the licence savings twice over.
Pick the tool that fits the budget. The Professional edition at $449 per user per year is a known cost. ZAP is free. Caido and the AI tools run on a different pricing model (per seat, per scan, per finding), and the right answer depends on the size of the org and the shape of the engagement.
Pick the tool that fits the workflow. Burp in CI/CD for the standard scan, the manual proxy for the deep engagement, and the extensions for the custom work: that combination points to Burp Enterprise. Most of the work in the browser, with AI assistance: that combination points to Caido. Volume, and the part where a human would have to triage: that combination points to the AI tools. An appsec lead who picks the tool that fits the org, the budget, and the workflow makes the right call.
The bottom line
Pick the tool that fits the appsec org, the budget, and the workflow. The right tool is the one the engineers will actually use, and that has not changed in 15 years.
Sources & Further Reading
All claims in this article are sourced from primary documentation, vendor advisories, and reputable security researchers.
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