Astra Security vs OWASP ZAP

Astra Security is a cloud platform for continuous penetration testing of web applications, APIs, and cloud infrastructure. Its DAST scanner covers more than 15,000 test cases and supports authenticated scans involving MFA, SSO, and custom authentication flows. PTaaS combines certified human penetration testers with AI-assisted threat modeling, scheduled tests, and free rescans after remediation. API security features discover shadow, dormant, and undocumented APIs and test API-specific attack cases. The cloud scanner supports AWS, Azure, and GCP with more than 400 checks. Integrations include Slack, Jira, Vanta, GitLab, Jenkins, Bitbucket, Azure, and CircleCI. Astra says it is SOC 2 Type II and ISO/IEC 27001 certified, and its Trust Center shares security evidence. Plans include Scanner Lite at $69 a month, Scanner at $199 a month, and annual pentest options. A target is a domain and its site-tree URLs, representing an application, IP, website, or API.

OWASP ZAP is a web application scanner and proxy for security testing. Its tools include active and passive scanning, a spider, alerts, and scan policies. ZAP’s Automation Framework uses YAML plans to coordinate jobs such as scanning, spidering, API imports, and report generation. It can import OpenAPI, GraphQL, SOAP, and Postman definitions through jobs or add-ons. GitHub Actions are available for baseline, full, and API scans via Docker-packaged scans, and the project publishes Docker images, including a minimal image for CI. Add-ons come from an online Marketplace and are generally installed or removed without restarting ZAP. The software is free and open source, with a free plan at free. It supports Linux, macOS, Windows, API use, and self-hosted deployment. Windows and Linux installers require Java 17 or later; the macOS installer includes Java 17. ZAP says it can support only its latest full release, and current releases are unsigned, though checksums are provided.