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PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional vs SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

PortSwigger Burp Suite Prof...
Ranking in Application Security Tools
8th
Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
63
Ranking in other categories
Fuzz Testing Tools (1st)
SonarQube Server (formerly ...
Ranking in Application Security Tools
1st
Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
1st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
114
Ranking in other categories
Software Development Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Application Security Tools category, the mindshare of PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional is 2.0%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) is 25.1%, down from 26.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Security Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Anuradha.Kapoor Kapoor - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers efficient scanning of entire websites but presence of false positive bugs, leading to time-consuming efforts in distinguishing real bugs from false alarms
We have found that so many times, false positive bugs are there, and then we spend a lot of time basically separating them from real bugs. So that's the reason we are looking for some other tool. So we were in discussion with Acunetix. Therefore, the false positive rate is, like, something that we would like to improve. What we are looking for is if this false positive rate goes down because we were OWASP Zap tool users, which was free anyway. But there were a lot of false positives there, and we used to spend a lot of time, like, for security reasons, reproducing those bugs for the development team to fix it. So then we thought, okay, why not we go with the tool? Even if it is not very expensive. But still, every year, we have to renew the license. And we got this tool. Again, we found that in this tool also, even if it is less, there are still a lot of false positive bugs out there. So we again have to spend so much time. So we hired a security tester, who was basically using Acunetix in his previous company for almost three years, and then you said that in that scanning is very slow. The scanning is also slow. Like, sometimes the site scan takes eight hours, six to eight hours. Yeah. And whereas in Acunetix, it took three to four hours. And plus, there are no false positives. I'm not saying none but there's very little. But here, the rate sometimes is very high. These are the two features I think we would like to improve further.
Wang Dayong - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to integrate and has a plug-in that supports both C and C++ languages
The product provides false reports sometimes. It also fails to understand the context of the code. It reports that a line of code has issues without considering its relation with the previous line. The product should improve the report quality. While it asks us to improve the code quality, it would be good if it also suggests how to improve the quality.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"I am impressed with the tool's detailed analysis for penetration testing. AppScan can give only visibility, but it can't do the PT part. But the PortSwigger Burp Application can do both, and it gives much more visibility on the PT rating."
"The extension that it provides with the community version for the skills mapping is excellent."
"The initial setup is simple."
"It is useful for scanning and tracing activities."
"The Spider is the most useful feature. It helps to analyze the entire web application, and it finds all the passes and offers an automated identification of security issues."
"The tool provides complimentary services. It allows you to add a lot of extensions, and you can get extensions quite often. It is quite a flexible application."
"The most valuable feature is Burp Collaborator."
"It offers very good accuracy. You can trust the results."
"When comparing other static code analysis tools, SonarQube has fewer false-positive issues being reported. They have a lot of support for different tech stacks. It covers the entire developer community which includes Salesforce or it could be the regular Java.net project. It has actually sufficed all the needs in one tool for static code analysis."
"It is very good at identifying technical debt."
"It assists during the development with SonarLint and helps the developer to change his approach or rather improve his coding pattern or style. That's one advantage I've seen. Another advantage is that we can customize the rules."
"Can tweak rules and feed them into our build pipelines."
"The integrations SonarQube provides with our software delivery pipeline are very seamless."
"The product is simple."
"The product has a friendly UI that is easy to use and understand."
"The most valuable features are code scanning and Quality Gates."
 

Cons

"PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional could improve the static code review."
"PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional can improve by having more features in the free version for beginners to try."
"One area that can be improved, when compared to alternative tools, is that they could provide different reporting options and in different formats like PDF or something like that."
"There is not much automation in the tool."
"The one feature that I would like to see in Burp is active scanning of REST based web services. A lot of organizations are providing APIs to access their services to support different business models like SaaS. Scanning these APIs is still a challenge for many security product companies."
"The solution is not easy to set it up. You need a lot of knowledge."
"The scanner and crawler need to be improved."
"The initial setup is a bit complex."
"The reporting is good, but I am not able to download a specific report as a PDF, so downloading reports is something that should be looked at."
"When we have a thousand products published over it, we expect it to be more efficient in terms of serving requests from the browser."
"This is a well-rounded solution, however, some features could be made available on the free version. The price of the solution could be reduced."
"The product needs to integrate other security tools for security scanning."
"There needs to be a shareable reporting piece or something we can click and generate easily."
"The exporting capabilities could be improved. Currently, exporting is fully dependent on the SonarQube environment."
"Their dashboarding is very limited. They can improve their dashboards for multiple areas, such as security review, maintainability, etc. They have all this information, so they should publish all this information on the dashboard so that the users can view the summary and then analyze it further. This is something that I would like to see in the next version."
"SonarQube could be improved with more dynamic testing—basically, now, it's a static code analysis scan. For example, when the developer writes the code and does the corresponding unit test, he can cover functional and non-functional. So the SonarQube could be improved by helping to execute unit tests and test dynamically, using various parameters, and to help detect any vulnerabilities. Currently, it'll just give the test case and say whether it passes or fails—it won't give you any other input or dynamic testing. They could use artificial intelligence to build a feature that would help developers identify and fix issues in the early stages, which would help us deliver the product and reduce costs. Another area with room for improvement is in regard to automating things, since the process currently needs to be done manually."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing is not very high. It was around $200."
"The platform's pricing is reasonable."
"PortSwigger is reasonably-priced. It's fair."
"We pay a yearly licensing fee for the solution, which is neither cheap nor expensive."
"This is a value for money product."
"There are different licenses available that include a free version."
"Burp Suite is affordable."
"We are using the community version, which is free."
"We're using an older version because it is the open-source flavor of it and we can continue using it at no cost. We're not paying any licensing at all, which was another factor in choosing this route so that we can learn and grow with it and not be committed to licenses and other similar things. If we choose to get something else, we have to relearn, but we don't have to relicense. Basically, we're paying no license costs."
"We are using the Developer Edition and the cost is based on the amount of code that is being processed."
"I think comparing the product to competitors it should be less expensive."
"I am satisfied with the pricing."
"This is open source."
"There is both a free and licensed version. The free version has limitations on development languages and support."
"We have a license with 125,000 lines of code. We did not purchase a lot of lines but it is specific to our code environment."
"This solution is free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Is OWASP Zap better than PortSwigger Burp Suite Pro?
OWASP Zap and PortSwigger Burp Suite Pro have many similar features. OWASP Zap has web application scanning available with basic security vulnerabilities while Burp Suite Pro has it available with ...
What do you like most about PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional?
The solution helped us discover vulnerabilities in our applications.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional?
I find the price of PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional to be very cost-efficient.
Is SonarQube the best tool for static analysis?
I am not very familiar with SonarQube and their solutions, so I can not answer. But if you are asking me about which tools that are the best for for Static Code Analysis, I suggest you have a look...
Which gives you more for your money - SonarQube or Veracode?
SonarQube is easy to deploy and configure, and also integrates well with other tools to do quality code analysis. SonarQube has a great community edition, which is open-source and free. Easy to use...
How would you decide between Coverity and Sonarqube?
We researched Coverity, but in the end, we chose SonarQube. SonarQube is a tool for reviewing code quality and security. It helps to guide our development teams during code reviews by providing rem...
 

Also Known As

Burp
Sonar
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Amazon, NASA, FedEx, P&G, Salesforce
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional vs. SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
848,716 professionals have used our research since 2012.