Compare OWASP ZAP vs. open-appsec

OWASP ZAP, which stands for Zed Attack Proxy, is a freely available, open-source tool for penetration testing, managed by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). This tool is specifically crafted for evaluating web applications, offering both flexibility and extensibility to its users. At its foundation, ZAP operates as a "man-in-the-middle proxy," allowing it to sit between the user's browser and the web application, enabling the interception and inspection of communications exchanged between the two, with the option to modify the content before relaying it to its final destination. It can function independently as a standalone application or run as a daemon process in the background. ZAP caters to various experience levels, making it suitable for developers, novices in security testing, and seasoned security testing professionals alike. Furthermore, it is compatible with major operating systems and Docker, ensuring users are not restricted to a single platform. Users can also enhance their ZAP experience by accessing additional features through a variety of add-ons found in the ZAP Marketplace, which can be conveniently accessed directly within the ZAP client. The continuous updates and community support further contribute to its robustness as a security testing solution.

open-appsec is an open-source initiative that builds on machine learning to provide pre-emptive web app & API threat protection against OWASP-Top-10 and zero-day attacks. It can be deployed as add-on to Kubernetes Ingress, NGINX, Envoy and API Gateways. The open-appsec engine learns how users normally interact with your web application. It then uses this information to automatically detect requests that fall outside of normal operations, and sends those requests for further analysis to decide whether the request is malicious or not. open-appsec uses two machine learning models: 1. A supervised model that was trained offline based on millions of requests, both malicious and benign. 2. An unsupervised model that is being built in real time in the protected environment. This model uses traffic patterns specific to the environment. open-oppsec simplifies maintenance as there is no threat signature upkeep and exception handling, like common in many WAF solutions.