What each one is
Burp Suite, by PortSwigger, is the tool most professional pentesters work with. It is a desktop application that sits between your browser and the site under audit: it captures every request, lets you modify and resend it, automates variations to probe a parameter thousands of times and, in the Professional edition, includes an automated scanner that crawls and audits the application. It comes in three editions: Community, free, with the manual tools and no scanner; Professional, paid per user; and Enterprise, for scanning many applications on a schedule. It is designed for a knowledgeable person to spend hours exploring an application by hand.
Scanaris is at the opposite end: a web service where you paste the URL of your published site and, about thirty seconds later, get 47 checks across eight pillars, read-only, ranked by impact, with a plain-language explanation and a fix prompt for every finding. Nothing to install, nothing to configure, no security knowledge needed.
Manual versus automatic
The difference is not one of quality but of nature. Burp is an instrument: what it finds depends on who is holding it. A good pentester with Burp uncovers business logic flaws, authorization bypasses between users, injections a scanner cannot see and chains of several small flaws into one serious one. No automatic tool does that, and neither does Scanaris. Even Burp Professional's scanner, which is automatic, needs someone to configure the scope, the authentication and the exclusions, and then review its results.
Scanaris is a service: it always does the same thing, to the same depth, with nobody operating it. It looks at what your site publishes (headers, cookies, certificate, reachable files, secrets in the JavaScript, email, domain, reputation, SEO and AI visibility) and compares it against good practice. It never sends manipulated data: that is why it can run daily against production without risk, and why it does not find what requires attacking.
How each one is used
With Burp you install the application, point your browser at its proxy (or use the built-in browser), navigate your application while Burp records everything, and then work on that traffic: replay requests with different parameters, run brute-force attacks on a field, test what happens when you swap one user's identifier for another's. On Professional you also launch the scanner over the defined scope and wait minutes to hours. The outcome is your own notebook of findings, plus the scanner's, which need triage.
With Scanaris you paste the URL. On the Pro plan it rescans daily without using your quota, warns you if the site goes down or the certificate expires, and the API and MCP server let you trigger scans from your own deployment flow. It comes in eight languages; Burp is in English.
What one finds and the other does not
- Only Burp (in capable hands): business logic flaws, access to other users' data by changing an identifier, authentication bypasses, injections, race conditions, flaws in payment or password-recovery flows. Everything that requires understanding the application and probing it by hand.
- Only Scanaris: SEO and AI visibility (robots, sitemap, metadata, structured data, llms.txt, AI crawlers), email (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), domain health, Safe Browsing reputation, basic accessibility and compliance signals. And the fix as a prompt, which Burp does not give.
- Both: security headers, cookies without attributes, exposed files, TLS, leaked versions. Burp Professional's scanner flags them; Scanaris explains them and tells you how to fix them on your hosting.
Pricing (October 2026)
Burp Suite Community is free, with no scanner and with the automated attack tool rate-limited. Burp Suite Professional costs around 500 dollars per user per year after the January 2026 price increase. Burp Suite Enterprise is quoted individually. On top of that comes what Burp really costs: the hours of the person running it, or the invoice of the pentest if you hire one.
Scanaris has a free scan with two or three findings unlocked, and plans at 24, 49 and 99 euros a month (17, 34 and 69 if you pay yearly) for 1, 5 and 25 projects, with the full report, the prompts, monitoring and the API.
When to use both
If you handle sensitive data, take payments or have users who can see each other, a manual pentest with Burp before launch and after every major change is replaced by nothing. Scanaris is what you do on all the other days: the daily, cheap check that the deployment is still configured properly, that nobody left a file exposed and that Google and AI assistants can read you. If you built your app with Lovable, Bolt or v0 and have no pentester today, start with Scanaris and the pre-launch security checklist; the pentest will come when the project justifies it.
Frequently asked questions
Can I use Burp without being an expert?
You can install it for free, and PortSwigger offers an excellent free web security academy to learn. But getting value out of it takes weeks of practice. It is not a tool for one afternoon.
Does Scanaris replace a pentest?
No. It covers the configuration and exposure of your published site, not the logic of your application. A pentest finds things no automatic scanner will see, and Scanaris finds things a one-off pentest does not watch every day.
Is it safe to use Burp against my production site?
Manual testing touches real data: you create accounts, modify orders, submit forms. The usual practice is to work on a staging environment. Scanaris, being read-only, is used directly against production.