Web Application vulnerability scanners comparison

Today a saw a message from "Anantasec" in the mailing "pen-test" about a evaluation/comparison of Web Application scanners. 

The products analyzed are IBM Appscan (7.7.620 SP2), HP Webinspect (7.7.869)  and Acunetix (6.0), all commercial products.

The analysis only evaluate the results of the scans against 16 applications, it doesn't compare features, options or capabilities of the products.

After reading the report i have some doubts about the origin of it. Maybe could be a biased analysis for Acunetix? It's an Anonymous writer, a blog with just one post.. it makes me wonder. (damn, no interesting metadata in the document )

Personally i used all the scanners and i'm happy with Appscan, i'm missing the scheduling option of Webinspect. Also Acunetix improved a lot in the latest versions, and could be an interesting option when considering price/value.

An interesting fact of the analysis is that each of the scanners performed better when scanning the demo application of their company :)

 

Here is the report from Anantasec, draw your own conclusions

Remember to use more than one tool for the task, to have complimentary result, and also that the scanner will not discover all the vulnerabilities on the application, so don't rely on them.

I always use ProxyStrike when doing the manual analysis of the application, and i discover XSS and SQL that none of the scanners mentioned before does. Btw a new version is coming!

If you want more options on Web application scanners don't forget the Open Source options, right now there is a clear leader in this field, W3aF, it's very complete and even have more plugins or checks than the commercials one, and is multi-platform.

What are you using?

-CMM