AI Pentesting

10 Best Burp Suite Alternatives in 2026, Sorted by What You Are Replacing

 Ninad Pathak - Tech Author
Ninad Pathak

Professional Code Breaker

Burp Suite is three different products wearing one name, so “a Burp Suite alternative” means nothing until you say which part you are replacing.

Replace the manual proxy and you need Caido, ZAP, or mitmproxy. Replace the scanner and you are shopping DAST. Replace the person driving it and you are buying a pentest.

TL;DR: CodeAnt AI is the strongest choice if the vulnerabilities Burp keeps finding trace back to code you own. It reads the repository, attacks the deployed application, publishes $24 per user per month, and bills pentesting only when a working exploit lands.

Everything below is sorted by which Burp gap it closes, with pricing taken from each vendor’s own page in July 2026.

Why Look for a Burp Suite Alternative?

Complaints that push people off Burp cluster into four, and three of them are structural rather than fixable.

  • The free-to-paid cliff. Community Edition cannot save a project, has no scanner, and ships Intruder as a demo. Professional is $499 per user per year, and PortSwigger’s order form forbids sharing a seat “even if only one person uses it at a time.”

  • It never reads your code. PortSwigger states plainly that “DAST necessitates that the security tester has no knowledge of an application’s internals.” No SAST, no dependency scanning, no pull-request feedback.

  • Java weight. PortSwigger recommends 16GB of RAM generally and 32GB for heavy scanning. Slow performance is among the top complaints G2 tallies, and a May 2026 reviewer reports that under 16GB “the slowdown during longer engagements becomes noticeable and frustrating.”

  • Coverage stops when the tester stops. Professional is single-user and local-only. Continuous coverage is Burp Suite DAST, a separate quote-only purchase.

What Burp keeps is real, and no tool below matches it on its own ground. The top reply on a thread about leaving Burp for Caido argues that “Burp ain’t that much on its own, but the extensions are those that really make it godlike. Turbo intruder seems a hard thing to replicate for example.”

Burp Collaborator and PortSwigger Research are similarly hard to replicate, and the same commenter reckons the license is cheap for what it does, “like 40$ per month, could be just one meal at the restaurant.”

The 10 Best Burp Suite Alternatives at a Glance

The columns are the three questions that actually decide a switch.

#

Tool

What it replaces

Entry price

Reads your code

1

CodeAnt AI

The scanner and the pentester

$24 per user/month

Yes

2

Caido

The manual proxy toolkit

Free, $20/month paid

No

3

ZAP by Checkmarx

Proxy plus scanner

Free

No

4

mitmproxy

The proxy, programmatically

Free

No

5

StackHawk

The scanner, inside CI

$10 per user/month

Reads repos for endpoints

6

Intruder

The scanner, as a service

Free, $239/month paid

No

7

Astra Security

The scanner and the pentester

$1,999/year pentest

No

8

Rapid7 InsightAppSec

Burp Suite DAST

From $175/app/month

No

9

Invicti with Acunetix

Burp Suite DAST

Quote only

No

10

Nuclei

Targeted scanning, scriptable

Free

No

Only Caido, ZAP, and mitmproxy replace Burp’s intercepting proxy. Everything else in this list replaces the scanner or the human, and none of the DAST platforms ships a proxy you can drive by hand.

The four matchups people search for most break down like this.

Matchup

Short answer

OWASP ZAP vs Burp Suite

ZAP is the free option covering both proxy and scanner, with weaker manual tooling and add-on OAST

Caido vs Burp Suite

Caido is faster and lighter for manual testing, without HTTP/2, Collaborator, or scanner maturity

Acunetix or Invicti vs Burp Suite

Enterprise DAST with proof-based scanning, quote-only, and no manual toolkit at all

CodeAnt AI vs Burp Suite

The only one that reads your source code, then attacks the deployed app with that context

The 10 Best Burp Suite Alternatives

Ordering runs from the tools that reach furthest past what Burp does down to the narrow specialists.

1. CodeAnt AI

CodeAnt AI is the only option here that analyzes your source code to find vulnerabilities and then attacks the deployed application with that knowledge. Burp starts every engagement cold, from the outside.

CodeAnt AI homepage with the headline Your Codebase Reviewed and Secured and a subheading about AI agents that review every pull request and continuously secure code, cloud, and runtime

That ordering is what a Burp buyer notices. An agent that already knows which routes accept user input and where those inputs flow starts from architecture rather than from a port scan.

Key features:

  • Three testing depths. Blackbox maps everything publicly reachable, Whitebox works from the code, and Graybox with Code Memory combines both.

  • Audit-grade reporting in 48 hours. CodeAnt’s pentesting page promises “a full audit-grade SOC2 or ISO27001 PDF report within 48 hours” against the two to four weeks a traditional firm takes.

  • AI code review on every pull request. Findings arrive as inline comments where the fix happens, not in a separate dashboard.

  • SAST, secrets, IaC, and dependency scanning in one pass. The whole category Burp routes to other vendors.

  • Published CVE research. The team has disclosed three CVEs, including CVE-2026-29000 in pac4j-jwt at CVSS 10 and CVE-2026-28292 in simple-git at CVSS 9.8.

Limitations:

  • No intercepting proxy, so nothing here replaces sitting in Repeater and hand-tuning a request.

  • Internal network and Active Directory attack emulation sit outside its scope.

  • No per-exploit rate card is published, so the pentest budget needs a conversation.

Choose it when: you keep finding that the bugs Burp proves in production were written weeks earlier in a pull request nobody security-reviewed.

Pricing (per the CodeAnt AI pricing page, July 2026):

Plan

Price

Includes

Free trial

14 days

100 PR reviews, unlimited seats, all premium features

Premium

$24 per user/month

Unlimited PR reviews, SAST, CI/CD review, audit reports

Enterprise

Contact

SSO, audit log, on-prem and VPC deployment

CodeAnt AI pricing page showing the 14-day free trial, the $24 per user per month Premium plan, and the Enterprise contact plan

The pentest side runs on a different meter entirely. CodeAnt’s pentesting page states you pay when “We ship a working PoC exploit” and never when “Nothing exploitable found”, with free unlimited re-scans after a fix.

CodeAnt AI pentesting page with the headline Find the breach before the attacker does and a promise of an audit-grade SOC2 or ISO27001 PDF report within 48 hours

Open-source projects pay nothing, and the CodeAnt AI and Burp Suite comparison covers where the two genuinely complement each other.

2. Caido

Caido is the tool people mean when they say “modern Burp”. Written in Rust with a client-and-instance architecture, it targets Burp’s manual workflow directly and runs its own side-by-side comparison page.

Caido homepage presenting a lightweight web security auditing toolkit

Momentum is the story here. Caido shipped ten major releases through 2025, now carries 42 plugins including an official Scanner, and acquired the Shift AI assistant in July 2025.

Key features:

  • HTTPQL. A query language for filtering traffic, which is the feature Burp users notice first.

  • Workflows. No-code and code automation for repetitive request manipulation.

  • Remote instances. The client connects to an instance running anywhere, which suits VPS-based testing.

  • Plugin store. Autorize, GraphQL-Analyzer, and an official Scanner among them.

  • Shift AI assistant. Included free for paid users.

Limitations:

  • No HTTP/2 support yet, listed on the 2026 roadmap while Burp has had it for years.

  • Not open source, despite frequently being described that way.

  • No hosted out-of-band service comparable to Burp Collaborator, and the scanner is young.

Choose it when: you live in a proxy all day, want something faster and lighter than a Java desktop app, and do not depend on Collaborator or HTTP/2.

Pricing: Basic is free forever, capped at two projects, seven workflows, three plugins, and five filter presets, with HTTPQL and the core HTTP tools included. Individual costs $20 a month or $200 a year, Team is priced per user with shared instances and reassignable licenses, and Enterprise is custom.

Caido applies purchasing-power-parity pricing by region, so the figures on your screen may differ from the US list price before you have compared a single quote. Students and teachers get a free one-year education plan.

3. ZAP by Checkmarx

ZAP is the best free alternative to Burp Suite and the only open-source option covering both halves of it at once, giving you an intercepting proxy and a genuine active and passive scanner under an Apache v2 license.

ZAP by Checkmarx homepage describing the world's most widely used web app scanner, free and open source

The naming confuses people in 2026, so here is the actual status. ZAP left OWASP for the Linux Foundation’s Software Security Project in 2023, and Checkmarx hired the core team in September 2024. The project states that “ZAP will stay under the control of the ZAP Core Team, remain open source, and stay licensed under Apache v2.”

Key features:

  • Proxy and scanner together. Manual interception plus automated active and passive scanning, at no cost.

  • Automation Framework. Purpose-built for CI/CD pipelines and repeatable scan definitions.

  • Full REST API and daemon mode. Headless operation for scripted and scheduled scanning.

  • Official Docker images. The usual way teams run it in CI.

  • Add-on marketplace. A long-established extension ecosystem.

Limitations:

  • Manual tooling is weaker than Burp Pro, and out-of-band testing arrives as an add-on instead of a hosted service.

  • No multi-user collaboration.

  • Commercial support means buying Checkmarx DAST, a separate quote-only product, so the free license comes with community support only.

Choose it when: budget is the constraint, you want auditable open source, and free CI scanning matters more than a polished manual workflow.

Pricing: free, with no paid tier of ZAP itself.

4. mitmproxy

mitmproxy replaces Burp’s proxy as programmable infrastructure rather than as an application. You get a terminal interface, a browser UI, a CLI, and a Python API, and nothing resembling an attack tool.

mitmproxy homepage describing an interactive HTTPS proxy for penetration testers and software developers

Key features:

  • Protocol coverage Burp took years to reach. HTTP/1, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, WebSockets, and TLS.

  • Three interfaces. mitmproxy in the terminal, mitmweb in a browser, mitmdump for scripting.

  • Python addon API. Traffic manipulation as code, versioned with your repo.

  • Multiple proxy modes. Regular, transparent, reverse, and WireGuard.

Limitations:

  • No scanner, no fuzzer, no site map, no project files, no reporting.

  • Effective use assumes you are comfortable writing Python.

Choose it when: you use Burp mainly to watch and rewrite traffic, especially for mobile testing or automated harnesses, and you would rather express that as code.

Pricing: free and MIT-licensed.

5. StackHawk

StackHawk moves dynamic testing to before the merge instead of after the deploy, running its scanner from inside CI. Its 2026 positioning aims squarely at code written by AI agents.

Key features:

  • Wingman agent skills. Installs into Claude Code, Cursor, and Copilot to scan, fix in the codebase, then rescan to verify.

  • HawkScan in CI. A binary that runs in GitHub Actions, GitLab, Jenkins, and CircleCI against a live build.

  • Broad API protocol support. REST, GraphQL, gRPC, and SOAP, with business-logic testing.

  • API discovery. Maps endpoints from connected repositories.

Limitations:

  • No manual toolkit at all, so it replaces Burp Scanner and not Burp itself.

  • No static analysis. StackHawk reads repositories to find endpoints, not defects.

  • Wingman caps at 50 scans per user per month, and Scale is quote-only.

Choose it when: your stack is API-heavy, you already have static analysis elsewhere, and you want runtime testing driven from inside the pull-request loop.

Pricing (per the StackHawk pricing page, July 2026):

Plan

Price

Includes

Wingman

$10 per user/month

Unlimited apps, 50 scans per user/month, 14-day free trial

Scale

Talk to us

Unlimited agentic scans, attack surface discovery, teams and roles

StackHawk pricing page showing the Wingman plan at $10 per user per month with a free 14-day trial and the quote-only Scale plan

6. Intruder

Intruder wraps several scanning engines behind one interface for teams without a security specialist, and its published pricing plus a real free tier make it the easiest entry point in this list.

Check the engine list before you treat it as a Burp replacement. Intruder’s own help centre documents Nuclei on the free tier, OpenVAS with Nuclei on Cloud, Tenable Nessus on Pro and Enterprise, and OWASP ZAP for web application and API scanning.

Key features:

  • Continuous external and cloud scanning. With Emerging Threat Scans when new CVEs land.

  • GregAI. A virtual security analyst that prioritizes findings and writes remediation guidance.

  • Cloud account sync. Automatic scans when new services appear in AWS, GCP, or Azure.

  • Agent-based internal scanning. Available from the Pro tier upward.

Limitations:

  • No manual toolkit, and the web application testing is wrapped ZAP, not proprietary.

  • Web apps are not included at all on the free tier.

  • Internal scanning and shadow-IT discovery sit behind Pro and Enterprise respectively.

Choose it when: you run a small team, need always-on perimeter and cloud coverage, and want a budget you can read without a sales call.

Pricing (per the Intruder pricing page, July 2026, annual billing saves 20%):

Plan

Price

Includes

Free

$0 forever

5 infrastructure targets, 3 users, weekly external scans, no web apps

Cloud

$239/month, $2,870 annually

Web app and API testing, GregAI, daily cloud checks

Pro

$399/month, $4,790 annually

Agent-based internal scanning, 10 cloud accounts

Enterprise

Custom

Shadow IT discovery, all ports, advanced access control

Intruder pricing page showing Free at $0, Cloud at $239 per month, Pro at $399 per month, and a custom Enterprise tier

AI-powered web application pentests are sold separately, starting from $3,500 per test.

7. Astra Security

Astra replaces the outcome, not the tool. Automated scans run first, then certified pentesters work the same dashboard, and you get a report an auditor will accept.

Key features:

  • Hybrid PTaaS. Automated scanning followed by manual testing from OSCP, CEH, and CREST-certified testers.

  • API security depth. Authenticated testing with thousands of test cases and discovery of shadow endpoints.

  • Authenticated DAST. Handles multi-factor login flows and JavaScript-heavy applications.

  • Cloud scanning. Agentless detectors across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

  • Compliance reporting. With a public trust centre for sharing results.

Limitations:

  • No SAST or code review product, so nothing examines your repository for defects.

  • Manual depth is plan-gated, with the entry pentest tier limited to OWASP Top 10 coverage.

  • Rescans are capped by plan, not unlimited.

Choose it when: you need a certified human’s signature on a report at a price you can put in a budget line before the call.

Pricing (per the Astra pricing page, July 2026):

Plan

Price

Includes

Scanner Lite

$69/month, $699/year

One target, automated scanning

Scanner

$199/month, $1,999/year

Unlimited scans

Pentest Basic

$1,999/year

OWASP Top 10 manual pentest, one rescan

Pentest Plus

$5,999/year

Certified expert pentest, cloud config review

Trials cost $7 for a week, and there is no free tier.

8. Rapid7 InsightAppSec

InsightAppSec is the closest published-price substitute for Burp Suite DAST, which matters because PortSwigger stopped publishing DAST prices between April 2024 and January 2025.

Key features:

  • Ninety-five plus attack types across a cloud-native scanning engine.

  • Universal Translator. Handles single-page apps and REST or JSON payloads that defeat older crawlers.

  • Attack Replay. Lets developers reproduce a finding themselves to confirm it.

  • On-prem or cloud scan engines, with scheduling and compliance reporting.

Limitations:

  • No manual toolkit, so this is a scanner swap, not a Burp swap.

  • Per-app pricing compounds quickly across a portfolio.

Choose it when: you want automated DAST with a number you can multiply before talking to sales, particularly if you already run Rapid7.

Pricing: starting at $175 per month per app, billed annually, per the InsightAppSec pricing page, which notes that all amounts are US dollars and international prices vary. A thirty-day free trial is available.

Rapid7 InsightAppSec pricing page showing Starting at $175 per month per app billed annually, with cloud and on-premises scan engines, unlimited concurrent scanning, and 95 plus attack types

9. Invicti with Acunetix

Invicti competes with Burp Suite DAST at the enterprise end, built around proof-based scanning that safely exploits a finding to confirm it before reporting.

Invicti homepage presenting its application security platform

Acunetix survives as the mid-market product in the same family, and Invicti acquired Kondukto in August 2025 to add application security posture management.

Key features:

  • Proof-based scanning. Confirms exploitability automatically to cut triage work.

  • API security. OpenAPI and GraphQL ingestion mapped to the OWASP API Top 10.

  • Predictive Risk Scoring across large application portfolios.

  • Agentic pentesting in early access.

Limitations:

  • Quote-only across both brands, with no free tier and no self-serve trial.

  • No manual toolkit whatsoever.

  • Agentic pentesting is not generally available yet.

Choose it when: you scan hundreds of applications, have procurement budget, and want confirmed findings instead of a triage queue.

Pricing: quote only on both Invicti and Acunetix, with evaluation handled through proof-of-concept licenses instead of a trial.

10. Nuclei

Nuclei is not a Burp replacement so much as the thing many testers run alongside one. ProjectDiscovery describes it as “a fast and customisable vulnerability scanner powered by simple YAML-based templates.”

Nuclei page on ProjectDiscovery describing the template-powered vulnerability scanner

Key features:

  • Template-driven detection. Over 6,500 community templates covering real-world exploits.

  • Multi-protocol. HTTP, TCP, DNS, and file-based checks with multi-step workflows.

  • Built for CI/CD. Automated security testing as a pipeline step.

  • Trivially extensible. A custom check is a YAML file, not a Java extension.

Limitations:

  • No proxy, no interception, no manual request editing.

  • Template-driven instead of crawling, so it finds what you point it at and nothing else.

  • The hosted cloud platform is a separate paid product.

Choose it when: you want fast, scriptable, repeatable checks for known issues across a lot of hosts, and you already have something else for exploration.

Pricing: the open-source CLI is free. ProjectDiscovery sells its cloud platform separately.

Which Burp Suite Alternative Reads Your Code?

The column Burp leaves empty is the one worth checking, because it decides whether you fix the bug or keep re-finding it.

Tool

Manual proxy

Automated scanner

Source-code analysis

Runs pre-merge

CodeAnt AI

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

Caido

Yes

Young plugin

No

No

ZAP by Checkmarx

Yes

Yes

No

Via CI

mitmproxy

Yes

No

No

No

StackHawk

No

Yes

Reads repos for endpoints

Yes

Intruder

No

Yes

No

No

Astra Security

No

Yes

No

No

Rapid7 InsightAppSec

No

Yes

No

No

Invicti

No

Yes

No

No

Nuclei

No

Templates only

No

Via CI

Burp Suite

Yes

Yes

No

No

The last two columns separate the field. CodeAnt AI is the only platform here that analyzes source code to find vulnerabilities and then attacks the deployed application, which is the defensive and offensive model in one product.

StackHawk reads repositories to map endpoints, not to find defects, and every other entry treats your codebase as somebody else’s problem.

How to Choose a Burp Suite Alternative

Find the row that matches your situation. The recommendation closes that specific gap instead of winning on feature count.

Your situation

Start with

Why

The bugs Burp proves keep tracing back to your own code

CodeAnt AI

Review, SAST, and exploit-validated pentesting in one platform, priced per user with pentests billed on proven exploits

You want a faster daily driver for manual testing

Caido

Rust-based, HTTPQL filtering, free tier that is genuinely usable

Budget is zero and you need proxy plus scanner

ZAP by Checkmarx

The only free tool covering both, Apache v2, CI-ready

You mainly use Burp to watch and rewrite traffic

mitmproxy

Programmable interception with HTTP/3 support

Testing must happen before the merge

CodeAnt AI, or StackHawk

CodeAnt reviews every pull request. StackHawk runs DAST from inside CI if static analysis lives elsewhere

Small team, no security specialist, readable budget

Intruder

Free tier, published plans, multiple engines behind one interface

An auditor wants a certified human’s report

Astra Security

Certified manual testing at a published annual price

You need scanner coverage across a large portfolio

Rapid7 InsightAppSec, or Invicti

Published per-app pricing, or proof-based scanning at enterprise scale

You need maximum manual control on a hard target

Stay with Burp Suite

Nothing here matches the extension ecosystem, Collaborator, or PortSwigger Research

That last row is not a formality. If your reason for shopping is depth on a single gnarly target, Burp Suite Professional at $499 remains the right answer, and the pricing breakdown shows what that actually costs once you add the operator.

Where This Leaves You

Burp Suite answers one question extremely well, which is what a skilled tester can prove about a target they are actively working. It has never answered the question of what happens to your applications in the eleven months nobody is testing them.

Pick the replacement that matches the gap. If the gap is the code that keeps producing the findings, start with the CodeAnt AI and Burp Suite comparison, and the Burp Suite features guide covers exactly what you would be giving up.

FAQs

What is the best Burp Suite alternative in 2026?

Is there a free or open source alternative to Burp Suite?

Is Caido better than Burp Suite?

Is OWASP ZAP better than Burp Suite?

Do any Burp Suite alternatives analyze source code?

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