Burp vs ZAP,
and the third option.
The usual question is whether to pay $499 for Burp Suite Professional or use ZAP for free. Hugin is the free option that is neither a JVM desktop app nor a scriptable library — one native binary, proxy, scanner, intruder, repeater and an AI agent.
what ships · what's paywalled · what's actually better
ZAP is open source and free in a way Hugin's proprietary core is not: you can read every line and fork it. Burp has the deeper active scanner and the extension ecosystem. Hugin competes on being free, native and self-contained.
Hugin vs
ZAP and Burp Suite
The rows that decide it, not all forty.
| Hugin | ZAP | Burp Suite Professional | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free · Pro €10/mo | Free | $499/yr |
| Open source | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Active scanner | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Intercepting proxy | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Intruder / fuzzer | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Native UI, no JVM | ✓ | ~ | ✗ |
| HTTP/3 (QUIC) proxy | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| AI agent over MCP | ✓ | ~ | ~ |
Asked
anyway.
Is ZAP as good as Burp Suite?
For automated scanning and CI, ZAP is excellent and free. For manual, browser-driven testing Burp's community and extension ecosystem is larger. The honest answer is that they overlap heavily and the choice is usually about workflow.
Is Hugin open source?
No. Hugin's core is proprietary; the WASM module SDK and part of the extension surface are open. ZAP is fully open source and Hugin is not, and this comparison says so rather than implying otherwise.
Why choose Hugin over ZAP?
If you want a native binary with a built-in scanner, intruder, race-condition engine and AI agent, without installing a JVM or writing ZAP scripts first. ZAP remains the better choice if licence freedom or its automation framework is a hard requirement.
Run it
yourself.
No sign-up, no card. Download and run.
The other
head-to-heads.
Free Burp Suite Alternative — Hugin vs Burp
Burp Suite Professional is the industry standard and it costs $499 a year. Hugin is the same shape of tool — intercepting proxy, active and passive scanner, intruder, repeater, sequencer — that runs natively, offline, and free for personal and educational use.
Caido vs Burp — and the Free Alternative
Caido is the modern, Rust-based proxy that has pulled a lot of Burp users. Burp is still the incumbent. Hugin is the third point: like Caido it is native, unlike Caido it ships an active scanner in the box.
Free Burp Collaborator Alternative — Self-Hosted OOB
Burp Collaborator is the out-of-band server that catches the bugs you cannot see in a response: blind SSRF, blind RCE, blind XXE. It is a Professional-only feature. Hugin's Oastify does the same job over 8 protocols, from your own infrastructure, at a tenth of the price.
Burp Intruder Alternative — Full Speed, Free
Burp Intruder is throttled to a demo in the free Community Edition; the real thing sits behind the $499/year Professional licence. Hugin's intruder is unthrottled and free — sniper, pitchfork, cluster bomb and battering ram, with payload generators and processors.
Free Burp Scanner Alternative — 64 Active Checks
Burp's web vulnerability scanner is a Professional-only feature and there is no free edition of it. Hugin's scanner ships in the free Community tier: 64 active checks and 48 passive checks, mapped to the OWASP and API Top 10, with no rate limit.
Burp Repeater Alternative — Free, Native
Burp Repeater is free in Community Edition and Hugin's is free too — this page is about the difference a native repeater makes, not about price. Hand-edit any request, replay it, diff the responses, and move on.
Burp Decoder, Comparer & Sequencer Alternatives
Burp's Decoder, Comparer and Sequencer ship free in Community Edition, so this is a fair fight rather than a paywall story. Hugin has all three, and adds a composable transform chain and a sequencer that runs the FIPS 140-2 randomness tests.
The full feature matrix
Every capability, every tier, side by side.