Caido vs Burp,
and Hugin.
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.
what ships · what's paywalled · what's actually better
Caido has a polished plugin ecosystem and a cloud-connected workflow; Burp has the deepest scanning research and the largest extension store. Hugin is younger and its UI is less mature than either.
Hugin vs
Caido and Burp Suite
The rows that decide it, not all forty.
| Hugin | Caido | Burp Suite Professional | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free · Pro €10/mo | Freemium | $499/yr |
| Written in | Rust | Rust | Java |
| Active scanner built in | ✓ | ~ plugin | ✓ |
| Intercepting proxy | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Repeater / replay | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Extension ecosystem | ~ | ✓ | ✓ |
| HTTP/3 (QUIC) proxy | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| AI agent over MCP | ✓ | ~ | ~ |
Asked
anyway.
Is Caido better than Burp?
Caido is lighter and more modern; Burp has deeper scanning and more extensions. For most testers the deciding factor is which workflow they have already built muscle memory for.
Does Caido have an active scanner?
Not built in. Caido's core is proxy, replay, automate, sitemap and plugins; an active scanner exists as a community plugin rather than a shipped capability. Hugin's active scanner is built in and free.
Which is the best free option of the three?
Hugin's Community tier is free with a built-in active and passive scanner. Caido Basic is free with proxy tooling and limits on projects. Burp Community throttles its scanner and Intruder. If a built-in scanner matters, Hugin is the free choice.
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.
Burp vs ZAP — and Where Hugin Fits
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.
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.