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There are so many different security testing tools so making a shortlist of the best can be tricky. You want to evaluate and improve the security of your software systems, networks, and applications - and need the right tool for your projects and team. I've got you covered! In this post I share from my personal experience using dozens of different security testing software with various teams and share my picks of the best security testing tools.

What Are Security Testing Tools?

Security testing tools are software used to assess and improve the security of computer systems, networks, and applications. These tools perform various tasks such as identifying vulnerabilities, simulating cyber-attacks, analyzing code for security flaws, and ensuring compliance with security standards. They play a crucial role in the proactive detection and mitigation of potential security threats.

The benefits and uses of security testing tools include enhancing the overall security posture of digital environments, protecting against unauthorized access and data breaches. They help in identifying and addressing security vulnerabilities early, reducing the risk of cyber-attacks. By ensuring compliance with security regulations, these tools build trust and credibility among users and stakeholders. They are essential in today’s digital landscape, where maintaining robust security practices is vital for protecting sensitive information and systems.

Overviews Of The 10 Best Security Testing Tools

Here’s a brief description of each security testing tool to showcase their best use case, some noteworthy features, and screenshots to give a snapshot of the user interface.

Best QA security testing with real-time performance insights

  • Free version available
  • From $49/user/month
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Rating: 4.3/5

New Relic is a performance monitoring and management platform that helps you keep an eye on your applications, infrastructure, and customer experience. It's designed to help you identify and fix issues before they become a problem, which is pretty awesome if you ask me.

I was impressed by how New Relic combines performance monitoring with security testing. It's not just about making sure your app is running smoothly; it's also about making sure it's secure. And for that, the platform connects with over 500 tools, which allow you to import telemetry from almost any tool you currently use.

Now, let's talk about some standout features that make New Relic different from other tools in the market. Here I would like to point out Grok, an AI assistant that can read your telemetry and identify outliers for you. Not only that, but you can ask questions to it and it will provide with potential code changes and find a root cause for an issue.

As mentioned earlier, a thing that sets New Relic apart is its integrations. It works seamlessly with a wide range of popular tools and platforms, like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and more. This means you can easily incorporate it into your existing workflow and get the most out of your security testing efforts. If, however, you cannot find a pre-built integration with a tool you currently use, you can use its API to custom-build it.

Overall, I think New Relic is a fantastic choice for anyone looking for a security testing tool that's both powerful and easy to use.

Security platform for 24/7 monitoring, protection, and testing

  • Free trial available
  • Pricing upon request
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Rating: 5/5

UnderDefense is a comprehensive security testing tool and compliance automation platform that offers 24/7 protection and comprehensive threat detection and response automation. It provides a full stack of services, including managed detection and response, penetration testing, and incident response, all backed by a 24/7 concierge team for overall business protection.

The platform monitors and assesses the security of your systems and networks so you can detect risks and vulnerabilities early, ensure compliance, and respond to incidents effectively. This all-in-one tool allows you to automate processes, from detection to remediation, so you can stay ahead of evolving digital threats and reduce the risk of cyber attacks in the future.

UnderDefense offers many integrations, including SentinelOne, Fireye, Cisco, Sumo Logic, Splunk, and more.

UnderDefense provides pricing upon request.

Open-source black-box security scanner

Wapiti is a free security scanner that allows users to audit websites and applications for vulnerabilities. The tool performs black-box scans, meaning it doesn’t study the source code of a web page. It crawls the pages of web applications, attacking scripts and injecting payloads to determine if vulnerabilities are present.

The scanner can detect various vulnerabilities, including SQL and XPath injections, open redirects, and subdomain takeovers. The system can also detect cross-site scripting (XSS) and differentiate between permanent and reflected XSS vulnerabilities. After each scan, Wapiti generates vulnerability reports available for download in various formats, including HTML, XML, and CSV.

Penetration testing software for detecting SQL injection vulnerabilities

SQLMap is a python-based penetration testing tool that automates the detection and exploitation of SQL injection flaws and database takeovers. Penetration testers can utilize five SQL injection techniques: boolean-based blind, time-based blind, error-based, UNION query, and stacked queries. The system supports MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, IBM DB2, and various other database management systems.

Once SQLMap detects SQL injection bugs in an application, testers can perform extensive database fingerprinting and execute various attacks. Supported attacks include brute-forcing table and column names, dumping database schemas, and enumerating users, privileges, and password hashes.

Penetration testers can integrate SQLMap with Burp Suite, an application testing tool, by utilizing PortSwigger’s SQLiPy extension.

SQLMap is free and open source.

Cloud-based vulnerability scanner with automatic IP and DNS tracking tool

  • 14-day free trial
  • From $157/month/1 application

Intruder is a cloud-based vulnerability scanner that identifies weak points in public and private servers, cloud systems, websites, and endpoint devices. The platform’s robust scanning engines can uncover application bugs, like SQL injections and cross-site scripting, missing security patches, and encryption weaknesses. Intruder automatically prioritizes security issues that leave your infrastructure the most vulnerable, making it easy to minimize your attack surface.

Software teams can continuously monitor their AWS, Google, and Azure cloud environments with Intruder’s CloudBot. The tool performs hourly checks on your cloud accounts and automatically adds new external IP addresses and hostnames to Intruder for vulnerability scanning. Intruder’s Cloud Connectors also remove any IP addresses no longer in use.

Intruder supports integrations with development tools, such as Jira and Github, to help software teams triage issues for remediation and receive helpful notifications.

Pricing for Intruder Pro and Intruder Essential is based on the number of assets you need to scan. Software teams can try Intruder Pro free for 30 days.

Extensible penetration testing tool with customizable heads up display

  • Free to use

OWASP ZAP is a free, open-source penetration testing tool for web applications. The system supports automated and manual penetration testing. ZAP’s ease of use makes the tool accessible to users of all skill levels, from developers to security experts. Testers can utilize ZAP as a stand-alone application or daemon process. Versions of Zap are available for major operating systems and Docker.

Many web application security testing tools aren’t user-friendly; however, ZAP simplifies penetration testing with its intuitive heads up display (HUD). The HUD is a user interface overlaid on a target application, enabling you to access ZAP functionality from any modern browser. This feature is handy for developers, who can efficiently conduct testing on custom build scripts by connecting them to the HUD.

The ZAP Marketplace contains an extensive library of add-ons to extend the tool’s functionality. Add-ons are available for crawling JavaScript-heavy websites and endpoint detection.

Cloud and application security tool that simplifies compliance testing

  • $499/month

The ImmuniWeb AI Platform offers a variety of SaaS products for asset discovery, penetration testing, and continuous web and mobile application monitoring. Security teams can monitor OWASP Top 10 and SANS Top 25 security vulnerabilities. Immuniweb offers a money-back guarantee if you find any false positives in your vulnerability reports.

ImmuniWeb On-Demand is a great tool to help businesses meet regulatory and compliance requirements in a simple, cost-effective way. It works by regularly performing a penetration test on systems that store or process personal data and identifying privacy misconfigurations that may violate compliance requirements. The platform covers a range of regulations, including HIPPA, California CCPA, CPRA, PCI DSS, Hong Kong PDPO, and EU and UK GDPR.

Users can easily integrate ImmuniWeb products with their existing development, web application firewall, and SIEM tools, including Bugzilla, Azure DevOps, Qualys WAF, and Splunk.

Pricing starts at $499/month. ImmuniWeb community edition offers a variety of free security tests for cloud systems, dark web exposure, and mobile and web applications.

Supply chain management solution with flexible policy engine

  • starting at $135/month for 25 developers.

Sonatype offers a suite of products that enable secure software supply chain management. Products include firewalls, application lifecycle management, auditing solutions, repository management, and security tools. Nexus Lifecycle is one of Sonatype’s security tools that helps developers protect their open-source dependencies. The tool automatically identifies and remediates open-source vulnerabilities, allowing enterprise developers to scale open source monitoring across their software supply chain.

Nexus Lifecycle provides a flexible policy engine that gives application security teams complete control of their software. AppSec teams can create custom policies based on app type and organization. Users can also configure policies to report risks to stakeholders or fail software builds based on the severity of policy violations.

Sonatype’s products integrate with popular development tools, including Docker, OpenShift, and Azure DevOps.

Pricing is based on the number of developers on your team, with Nexus Lifecycle starting at $135/month for 25 developers.

Continuous code inspection app great for enforcing quality standards

  • From $20,000/year

SonarQube continuously inspects code quality utilizing static code analysis. The platform generates detailed reports on bugs, code smells, vulnerabilities, and code duplications, enabling software teams to detect security issues early in development. The program supports over 25 programming languages, including Python, Java, C#, and VB.NET.

Developers can ensure their code is ready for release with SonarQube’s Quality Gates, which enforce your organization’s quality policy. Developers can define a set of conditions a project must meet, and SonarQube will indicate whether your code has passed or failed. SonarQube recommends utilizing their default “Sonar way” Quality Gate, which focuses on keeping new code clean and spending less effort remediating old code.

SonarQube integrates with Jenkins, Azure DevOps, BitBucket, GitHub, and many other DevOps platforms.

Pricing for SonarQube’s Developer plan starts at $150/year based on usage. The Enterprise edition starts at $20,000/year. A free, open-source solution is also available.

Developer-friendly security platform with real-time semantic code analysis

  • $98/developer/month

Snyk is a developer-first security platform that automatically identifies vulnerabilities in code, open-source dependencies, containers, and infrastructure as code. Built on an industry-leading security intelligence database, Snky empowers its users to detect more vulnerabilities faster. The platform also supports various programming languages, including JavaScript, Java (Grable, Maven), .Net, Python, and Ruby.

Developers can implement real-time semantic code analysis into development with Snyk’s static application security testing platform, Snyk Code. Powered by machine learning, Snyk Code utilizes logic programming rules to identify security issues as code is written. The system is trained on Snyk’s Vulnerability Database, resulting in fewer false positives.

Snyk integrates with leading DevOps tools, including Microsoft Visual Studio, GitHub, CircleCI, and Jira.

A free forever plan with limited testing is available for individual developers. Subscriptions for teams start at $98/developer/month.

The Best Security Testing Tools Summary

Tools Price
New Relic From $49/user/month
UnderDefense Pricing upon request
Wapiti No price details
SQLMap No price details
Intruder From $157/month/1 application
Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) Free to use
ImmuniWeb $499/month
Sonatype starting at $135/month for 25 developers.
SonarQube From $20,000/year
Snyk $98/developer/month
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Use our comparison chart to review and evaluate software specs side-by-side.

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Other Options

Here are a few more security testing tools that didn’t make the top list.

  1. Google Nogotofail

    Network security testing tool for detecting known TLS/SSL vulnerabilities

  2. Invicti

    DAST + IAST scanner that provides precise threat detection

  3. Vega

    Java-based security scanner and testing tool for web applications

  4. BeEF (Browser Exploitation Framework)

    Pen testing software for web browsers

  5. Wfuzz

    Provides framework to automate security scanning and penetration testing for Python-based web applications

  6. Cyberpion

    Attack surface management solution with multi-factor vulnerability assessment engine

  7. Probely

    Developer-friendly web application and API vulnerability scanner

  8. Burp Suite

    Web security platform with automated and manual pen testing tools

  9. Rapid7

    All-in-one solution for automated application security, detection, and response

  10. Tenable

    Risk-based vulnerability management solution with threat prediction capability

Comparison Criteria

These criteria will help you evaluate the top security testing tools on the market. 

  1. User Interface (UI): An easy-to-use interface leads to faster adoption of new security testing tools. 
  2. Usability: Developers are increasingly prioritizing security, meaning your testing tools need to be accessible to stakeholders outside the security team.  
  3. Integrations: A security testing tool that supports your existing SIEM and DevOps tools won’t disrupt productivity. 
  4. Value for $: Ensure the cost of your security tool is aligned with the value it provides to keep your IT infrastructure safe.  

Security Testing Tools: Key Features

  1. Asset detection: Automated asset detection ensures your entire IT environment is monitored for critical vulnerabilities. 
  2. Static application security testing (SAST): SAST tools help developers implement security operations earlier in the software development lifecycle. 
  3. Policy management: A flexible policy management system enables DevSecOps teams to enforce software quality standards during each stage of development. 
  4. Threat prioritization: With automated threat prioritization, teams can focus on remediating issues that leave their systems the most vulnerable. 

What do you think about this list?

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By Paulo Gardini Miguel

Paulo brings +12 years of experience in software development and team building, creating products for the Media and Advertising industries. With a track record of building high-performance lean teams, he specializes in handling large volumes of data and empowering his team to own their projects and products. When he’s not working, he’s a frustrated musician with a passion for football and technology.