Looking for a Checkmarx alternative?
Checkmarx is a full enterprise application-security platform: SAST, DAST, software composition analysis, and ASPM marketed as one "code to cloud" suite, with deep compliance and governance, broad language coverage, and custom query authoring. For a regulated enterprise with a security team and a procurement process, that breadth is a legitimately strong fit. It's a lot of platform — and a sales cycle and a quote — if you're a solo dev or a small team shipping JS/TS/Python out of Cursor, Bolt, or Lovable and you just want to see the likely security issues before you deploy. XploitScan is the lighter, flat-priced, self-serve alternative tuned for AI-generated code. Here's the honest comparison.
A flat price you can read on the website, not a quote
Checkmarx is sales-led: there's no public self-serve pricing, so adopting it means a demo, a scoping conversation, and a quote before you can run a scan. That's the right motion for an enterprise buying a whole AppSec program. It's a heavy lift if you just want to check the code you shipped this afternoon.
XploitScan is flat and self-serve: Free $0 (5 scans/day, 30 rules), Indie $9/mo (500 scans/mo, all 210 rules), Pro $19/mo (unlimited, 7-day free trial), Team $99/mo (5 seats), annual cheaper. You can start for free without an account or a sales call — "npx xploitscan scan ." runs locally and your code never leaves your machine.
When each one fits
Checkmarx is great when
- → You're an enterprise that wants SAST, DAST, SCA, and ASPM unified in one platform rather than stitched together
- → You're in a regulated industry and need deep governance, audit trails, and policy enforcement across many teams
- → Your codebase spans many languages and you want one tool covering all of them
- → You have security engineers who want to author custom queries for organization-specific patterns
- → You're standing up an org-wide AppSec program and have procurement and a security team to run it
XploitScan is great when
- → You're a solo dev or small team and a full enterprise platform (plus a sales cycle) is overkill
- → You're shipping AI-generated code from Cursor, Lovable, Bolt, Replit, or Claude Code and want rules tuned for what those tools ship by default
- → Your stack is JavaScript, TypeScript, or Python
- → You want to start in one command with no quote and no account: npx xploitscan scan .
- → Flat, public pricing ($9–$99/mo) fits the budget, and you want every finding to come with a copy-paste fix
Side-by-side
| Dimension | Checkmarx | XploitScan |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Quote-based, sales-led; no public self-serve pricing | Flat and public: Free $0 / Indie $9 / Pro $19 / Team $99 per month (annual cheaper) |
| Getting started | Demo, scoping call, and a quote before first scan | npx xploitscan scan . — no signup, runs locally, code never leaves your machine |
| Scope | Full AppSec suite: SAST + DAST + SCA + ASPM, code to cloud | Focused SAST-style security findings, tuned for AI-generated code |
| Languages | Broad, many languages | JavaScript, TypeScript, Python |
| Detection approach | Enterprise SAST engine with custom query authoring | 210 rules via regex + AST + a light taint pass — honest about not being CodeQL-grade semantic analysis |
| AI-code tuning | General-purpose enterprise rules | 210 rules (30 free, 180 Pro) targeting patterns AI tools ship by default |
| Public benchmark | None disclosed | Live and reproducible at xploitscan.com/benchmark — 100% precision, ~98.7% recall on 230+ fixtures, regenerated every commit |
| Distribution | Enterprise platform with broad integrations | Web app, npm CLI, GitHub Action (SARIF), GitHub App (auto PR Check Runs), MCP server |
Where Checkmarx legitimately wins
- Full AppSec suite in one platform. Checkmarx unifies SAST, DAST, software composition analysis, and ASPM under one roof, marketed as code to cloud. XploitScan is a focused security scanner — it does not do DAST, dependency/container scanning, or posture management across your cloud, and doesn't try to.
- Regulated-industry governance and audit. For banks, healthcare, and other regulated orgs, Checkmarx offers the deep governance, policy enforcement, and audit depth a compliance program requires. XploitScan maps findings to SOC 2, ISO 27001, OWASP Top 10, and CWE for reference, but that's informational mapping to help organize remediation — not certification, attestation, or governance tooling.
- Language breadth and custom queries. Checkmarx covers many languages and lets security engineers author custom queries for organization-specific patterns. XploitScan covers JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python with a fixed rule set, and its engine is regex + AST + a light taint pass — not the CodeQL-grade semantic analysis a custom-query platform gives you.
- Large-org integration. Checkmarx is built to roll out across many teams with the SSO, role management, and enterprise integrations a big organization needs. XploitScan runs locally and via lightweight surfaces (CLI, GitHub Action, GitHub App, MCP server) — great for an individual or small team, not a substitute for an enterprise rollout.
Try XploitScan on your code
Free, 5 scans/day, no account and no quote required. One command — npx xploitscan scan . — runs on your stack and your code never leaves your machine. Plain-English fixes you can paste straight back into the editor, with SARIF output and a GitHub App for PR checks built in.
XploitScan maps findings to SOC 2, ISO 27001, OWASP Top 10, and CWE for reference — informational mapping to help organize remediation, not a certification. XploitScan is built by Cipherline LLC, Fairfield CT.