Burp Enterprise
Pros:
- Offers granular control and customization to fit the distinct needs of a mature security program.
- Empowers expert teams with a strong DAST scanner for deep-diving into known applications.
Cons:
- Requires you to manually discover and define every target you need to scan.
- Demands a significant time investment for setup, maintenance, and tuning as a self-hosted solution.
Detectify
Pros:
Cons:
- Prioritizes actionable, high-impact vulnerabilities over exhaustive coverage of all technical flaw types.
In-depth comparison: Visibility and Context
Visibility and context are the foundation of any scalable testing program. For an AppSec Engineer, the value of a tool is measured by its ability to solve specific, daily challenges. When it comes to visibility and context, Detectify and Burp Suite Enterprise are designed to address this challenge in two distinctly different ways.
Detectify operates on an “outside-in” philosophy, beginning with discovery. Detectify wants to first answer the question, “What is my complete external attack surface?” It provides capabilities for automated domain discovery and attack surface attribution, cataloging assets, and enriching them with contextual data like open ports, fingerprinted technologies, and DNS record types. Based on this discovered inventory, it then automatically classifies assets and provides recommendations on what to scan. For the AppSec engineer, this approach is designed to reduce blind spots and provide a data-driven starting point for DAST scanning, ensuring that testing efforts are applied to a comprehensive and understood asset list.
Burp Suite Enterprise, in contrast, operates on an “inside-out” philosophy. It is a pure-play DAST scanner built to answer the question, “Is this specific web application I already know about secure?” The tool requires the user to explicitly define every target to be scanned. It does not have features for discovering unknown subdomains or providing a broad inventory of an organization’s attack surface. Its context gathering, such as technology fingerprinting, occurs after a scan is initiated on a known target to tailor the assessment. For the AppSec engineer, this approach provides a powerful, scalable engine for deep-diving into known, high-value applications. The responsibility for asset discovery, inventory, and scan prioritization rests entirely with the user before they even begin using the tool.
In-depth comparison: Assessment
A vulnerability assessment tool’s core value lies in its methodology for identifying vulnerabilities. For the AppSec Engineer, the how is just as important as the what. Detectify and Burp Suite Enterprise represent two different, yet valid, approaches to vulnerability discovery.
Detectify’s assessment methodology is centered on a payload-based, multi-sourced model. Every test is designed to confirm the presence of a vulnerability with a high degree of certainty, mirroring the techniques used by attackers. The vulnerability intelligence is sourced from the Detectify Crowdsource community, a network of vetted ethical hackers who submit real-world exploit PoCs. Detectify also leverages its internal Security Research team and Alfred, an AI agent that discovers and builds POCs of relevant CVEs. This approach prioritizes depth and actionability over breadth, aiming to deliver findings with a near-zero false positive rate. For an AppSec engineer, this model is designed to reduce the time spent on validation and allow for a quicker transition from discovery to remediation.
Burp Suite Enterprise employs a comprehensive, hybrid DAST methodology. Its assessment capabilities are built on the industry-respected Burp Scanner, which combines multiple techniques. It uses traditional signature-based scanning for known vulnerability patterns, behavioral-based analysis to observe application responses to unexpected inputs, and fuzzing with a wide array of payloads. For an AppSec engineer, this provides an exhaustive assessment designed for maximum coverage across a wide spectrum of technical vulnerability classes despite the noise of signature-based scanning
What about API Testing?
- An AppSec engineer using Burp Suite Enterprise can achieve broad coverage of their API attack surface by providing the relevant specification files and letting the comprehensive scanner audit for a wide range of potential flaws.
- Detectify’s API scanner is built on a proprietary engine designed for dynamic fuzzing. Instead of just running a static set of checks, it probes the API with randomized and rotated payloads with every scan. With a massive library of variations (e.g., 330,000+ payloads for command injection), it is designed to discover vulnerabilities that static checks would miss, even on an unchanged target.
While Burp Suite Enterprise might come up short in API scanning, it exceeds Detectify in its out-of-band testing, offering a great scope of vulnerability types it can test for. Detectify’s out-of-band testing is limited to tests like RCE and SSRF, so users should consider if this is a required capability when evaluating both solutions.
In-depth comparison: Usability
For an AppSec Engineer, the journey from identifying a tool to finding and fixing the first vulnerability is a key measure of its usability. The onboarding experience with Detectify and Burp Suite Enterprise follows two distinct paths.
The engagement model with Detectify is characteristic of a modern SaaS platform, designed for rapid time-to-value. Getting started involves creating an account and connecting cloud providers to initiate Surface Monitoring. Within a short period, an engineer can see a map of their external attack surface, providing immediate visibility. That same engineer can then configure scans for their web apps. The first actionable value is often realized quickly, either through a discovered asset or a high-confidence vulnerability finding from the scanner. Throughout this process, Customer Success Manager (CSM) and Customer Success Engineer (CSE) are available to guide the user (depending on their subscription), ensuring the tool is configured for maximum impact and that findings are understood.
The journey with Burp Suite Enterprise is a more traditional, self-hosted experience that prioritizes control and customization. As a self-hosted solution, it requires dedicated servers or VMs for its components, along with the ongoing operational overhead for maintenance, patching, and scaling. The initial setup and deployment can take days or weeks. Furthermore, there is a continuous time investment required from the AppSec team to manually define targets, tune scan configurations to balance speed and coverage, and validate findings to filter out false positives.
Conclusion: Which product should I choose?
The decision between Burp Suite Enterprise and Detectify comes down to your team’s primary security challenge and operational philosophy. Burp Suite Enterprise is an excellent choice for mature security organizations that require tooling that can be customized to fit their distinct environment. Its ideal use case is for teams that already have a well-defined asset inventory and need a highly customizable scanning to perform scans on their infrastructure. While it demands a significant upfront investment in on-premise setup, configuration, and expert triage of results, the long-term value lies in its granular control.
Detectify is built for the AppSec engineer whose first challenge is visibility and whose priority is speed-to-remediation. It is the better fit for fast-paced environments needing to gain control over a sprawling and potentially unknown external attack surface. It allows users to test each and every asset with high-confidence, payload-based DAST. Detectify delivers value almost immediately, helping teams discover their assets and find actionable, low-noise vulnerabilities in hours, not weeks.
If your priority is to find exploitable web and API vulnerabilities on your perimeter and reduce your team’s triage workload, Detectify is the correct choice.
