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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
10th
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 May 2025, in the Application Security Tools category, the mindshare of PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional is 2.1%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) is 24.5%, down from 27.0% 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.
Chetan Jayatheertha - PeerSpot reviewer
Has a great quality gate feature and improves the code coverage in your core base
We would like to have more visibility and more documentation, starting with the installation. It needs to be more standardized and explain all the features. We'd also like to get an idea of the level of stability we can get for our larger-sized projects. The notifications from the channel queue can be improved including email notifications. We currently rely on getting those notifications passed onto us and that should not be the case. The customization of different languages would also be helpful. If all the above could be implemented, SonarQube would be the best vulnerability security scanning tool.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The technical support from PortSwigger is excellent, managing response time and quality efficiently without any issues."
"The automated scan is what I find most useful because a lot of customers will need it. Not every domain will be looking for complete security, they just need a stamp on the security key. For these kinds of customers, the scan works really well."
"It offers very good accuracy. You can trust the results."
"I rate PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional ten points out of ten."
"This tool is more accurate than the other solutions that we use, and reports fewer false positives."
"The suite testing models are very good. It's very secure."
"The extension that it provides with the community version for the skills mapping is excellent."
"The most valuable feature of Burp Suite Professional is its ability to schedule tasks for scanning websites, which helps in performing regular checks of IP addresses."
"It's enabled us to improve software quality and help us to disseminate best practices."
"SonarQube is good in terms of code review and to report on basic vulnerabilities in your applications."
"SonarQube is one of the more popular solutions because it supports 29 languages."
"Using SonarQube benefits us because we are able to avoid the inclusion of malware in our applications."
"The solution can verify vulnerabilities, code smells, and hotspots. It makes the software more secure and it helps make a junior or novice developer sharper."
"I follow Quality Gate's graduation model within organization, and it is extremely helpful for me to benchmark products."
"We advise all of our developers to have this solution in place."
"It easily ties into our continuous integration pipeline."
 

Cons

"The Burp Collaborator needs improvement. There also needs to be improved integration."
"There is not much automation in the tool."
"Mitigating the issues and low confluence issues needs some improvement. Implementing demand with the ChatGPT under the web solution is an additional feature I would like to see in the next release."
"The solution is not easy to set it up. You need a lot of knowledge."
"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."
"The solution lacks sufficient stability."
"Improvement should be done as per the requirements of customers."
"Sometimes the solution can run a little slow."
"An improvement is with false positives. Sometimes the tool can say there is an issue in your code but, really, you have to do things in a certain way due to external dependencies, and I think it's very hard to indicate this is the case."
"Dynamic scanning is missing and there are some issues with security scanning."
"Although it has Sonar built into it, it is still lacking. Customization features of identifying a particular attack still need to be worked on. To give you an example: if we want to scan and do a false positive analysis, those types of features are missing. If we want to rescan something from a particular point that is a feature that is also missing. It’s in our queue. That will hopefully save a lot of time."
"We called support and complained but have not received any information as we use the free version. We had to fix it on our own and could not escalate it to the tool's developer."
"We're in the process of figuring out how to automate the workflow for QA audit controls on it. I think that's perhaps an area that we could use some buffing. We're a Kubernetes shop, so there are some things that aren't direct fits, which we're struggling with on the component Docker side. But nothing major."
"Code security could be better. They are already focusing on it, but I see a lot of improvement opportunities over there. I can see a lot of false positives in terms of security. They need to make the tests more accurate so that the false positives are not detected so frequently. It would also help if they provided us with an installer."
"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."
"A better design of the interface and add some new rules."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"PortSwigger is a bit expensive."
"There is no setup cost and the cost of licensing is affordable."
"The cost is approximately $500 for a single license, and there are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"They should reduce the license cost a little bit. It is $400 per user, and it would be better if they could reduce the licensing fee."
"The solution is reasonably priced."
"We pay a yearly licensing fee for the solution, which is neither cheap nor expensive."
"The platform's pricing is reasonable."
"The yearly cost is about $300."
"It is very expensive. Its price should be improved."
"We're using their free Community Edition version."
"Get the paid version which allows the customized dashboard and provides technical support."
"SonarQube is a cost-effective solution."
"The free version of SonarQube does everything that we need it to."
"Compared to similar solutions, SonarQube was more accessible to us and had more benefits, with regards to size of the code base and supported languages. Apart from the Enterprise licensing fee, there are no additional costs."
"For the Community edition, there is no extra cost. It's totally free. The Enterprise edition, Data Center edition, and Developer edition are the paid versions."
"We are using the Developer Edition and the cost is based on the amount of code that is being processed."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
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.
851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.