Top API Pentesting Tools Every Security Pro Must Know!

Quick Overview: Choosing the right API pentesting tool is crucial for securing applications. This blog explores the top 8 API security testing tools, including AI-driven, open-source, and enterprise-grade platforms. Learn how these tools help detect vulnerabilities, automate testing, and enhance security, ensuring your APIs remain resilient against evolving cyber threats.

APIs are critical assets for any technology that enables critical data transferring. That’s the reason they are becoming prone to cyber-attacks, as they provide direct access to data, backend systems, and critical functions.

In fact, security APIs have become quite challenging tasks for developers and security experts, with the rise of cyber-attacks happening in recent years. As per Gartner, 90% of web-enabled applications now have a larger attack surface in exposed APIs than in their user interfaces, making API security a critical priority for developers and organizations.

On the other hand, nearly one-third of customer-facing APIs still operate without HTTPS protection, even though 90% of web pages are secured. While teams invest heavily in security applications and data, API security remains an overlooked risk, leaving critical assets exposed to potential attacks.

This has led to demand for API pentesting tools or security tools. While many organizations have to manage hundreds of APIs and inconsistent security risks, traditional security tools can’t handle. Fortunately, dedicated API penetration testing tools address the gaps that traditional tools leave behind. Hence, organizations need to understand the importance of API security testing and embrace some tools to overcome the challenges they have been facing.

In this article, let’s go through some common API security risks and vulnerabilities and what the best tools available in the market are that every professional should consider.

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How Can API be Vulnerable?

The attacks on APIs can lead to exposing large amounts of sensitive data or giving attackers access to your systems. Where should you begin?

Start addressing the most critical API vulnerabilities listed by OWASP TOP 10 API Security. This consists of broken authentication, SQL injection, misconfigurations, and more. These flaws can lead to devastating breaches, like the 2021 Freepik incident, where an SQL injection attack exposed 8.3 million user accounts.

8 Best API Security (Penetration) Testing Tools

1. ZeroThreat

ZeroThreat is the best automated penetration testing tool available in the market for APIs. It combines automated API discovery and protection with AI-powered test cases. It performs over 40,000 tests to map all endpoints and ensure holistic security.

ZeroThreat’s API security testing leverages a Zero Trust architecture with an integrated shift-left approach, which enables developers and security experts to detect real threats, discover APIs and suggest fixes to verified vulnerabilities, thereby eliminating the API attack surface risk.

Key Features:

• Gain full visibility into all APIs and proven threats to seamlessly enhance your API security strategy.
• Combines Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) with automated security.
• Easily integrate with CI/CD pipelines, providing verified API vulnerability detection and suggested fixes.
• Generated detailed security reports instantly.
• Point-and-click simplicity scanning in minutes.

2. Postman API Security

The primary objective of Postman was a collaborative API development platform. However, it has been adapted to pentesting with over time. This tool simplifies the approach to the API lifecycle to streamline collaboration. It enables developers to integrate into the API pentesting chain as a browser and client application layer and proxied through an interception proxy such as ZAP or Burp.

Its API pentest platform is capable of detecting many critical vulnerabilities beyond the OWASP API Top 10. This offers developers clear security guidelines within their existing platform for designing, building, testing, and deploying APIs. However, it may add headers to requests, potentially causing backend API errors.

Key Features:

• Identifies OWASP Top 10 API vulnerabilities early with built-in security flaws.
• Have some security policies using Spectral guidelines.
• Runs security checks in CI/CD, blocking insecure builds.
• API monitoring with detecting security issues in real time.
• Automates tests like authorization checks to prevent regressions.

3. FireTail

FireTail, built on modern API standards, provides a comprehensive API pentesting solution to detect, analyze, and secure sensitive data. It has multiple features like PII scrubbing, response validation, and sanitization. Its triggers enable personalized, automated notifications with integrations for email, messaging, ticketing, and SIEM platforms.

Key Features:

• Identifies and analyzes sensitive data across all APIs.
• Detects and removes sensitive personally identifiable information.
• Ensures secure and compliant API responses.
• Customizable alerts for security teams.

4. ZAP

ZAP (Zed Attack Proxy) is an open-source automated API pentesting tool designed to detect vulnerabilities in the CI/CD pipeline. In fact, it automates the vulnerability detection process, allowing developers and testers to identify security gaps in the development lifecycle. This API security tool offers continuous vulnerability scanning for APIs defined by SOAP or OpenAPI with active and passive scans. Also, it offers the best practices for GraphQL API security.

Key Features:

• Detects common API vulnerabilities like SQL injection, XSS, CSRF, and more.
• Supports both automated scanning and manual attack testing for various requirements.
• Easily integrates with existing development environments.
• Extends support for automated authentication to scan protected areas of applications.
• Provides insights for targeted security improvements, covering API pentesting checklist.

5. Burp Suite

Burp Suite is a renowned web vulnerability scanner, which detects vulnerabilities in web applications, including APIs. It comes with multiple tools, including API scanner tool that enhances the process of vulnerability detection, attack simulation, and testing defenses.

Burp Suite is an ideal API penetration testing tool for running manual security tests on endpoints. Due to its strong community support, it has become a go-to API security tool for developers.

Key Features:

• Supports in-depth manual API pentest.
• Its features like Repeater and Intruder enable manual exploitation and verification.
• Automated scanning capabilities to detect common vulnerabilities across web apps and APIs.
• Supports integration with CI/CD pipelines.
• Delivers insights to help teams prioritize fixes.

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6. Wallarm

Wallarm specializes in pentesting API, offering tools to detect vulnerabilities and counter real-time threats. It provides full API visibility, securing both modern and legacy web applications. The platform integrates with CI tools like GitLab, Jenkins, and Selenium while generating OpenAPI specs from traffic analysis.

Furthermore, Wallam offers protection against many threats, including those specific to APIs, account takeover, malicious bots, and L7 DDoS attacks. This enables swift incident response with intelligent triggers and threat verification.

Key Features:

• Comprehensive web app security testing to identify gaps.
• Automatically creates API documentation for better security monitoring.
• Detects and blocks malicious bots targeting APIs and applications.
• Detects and stops credential stuffing and brute-force attacks.
• Enables rapid response with intelligent triggers and streamlined workflows.

7. 42Crunch

42Crunch is a popular API security testing tool to detect and fix vulnerabilities in APIs. Its API security audit performs static analysis on OpenAPI definitions, identifying issues based on OWASP API Security Top 10. Its functionality of API Conformance Scan detects risks like data leakage, weak authentication, and injection flaws within OpenAPI contracts.

Beyond static analysis, API Scan enables dynamic testing by simulating real API traffic with randomized requests, ensuring security and compliance with OpenAPI contracts. 42Crunch integrates seamlessly with developer IDEs and CI/CD platforms, offering 300+ security checks, real-time scoring, actionable reports, and live endpoint testing. It empowers developers to secure APIs from the design phase while enabling security teams to enforce policies effectively.

Key Features:

• Delivers instant security ratings and risk assessments.
• Offers clear insights and remediation steps for detected vulnerabilities.
• Ensures APIs function securely and correctly under various conditions.
• Easily integrate with developer tools and pipelines for continuous security testing.
• Helps security teams define and enforce API security policies from the design phase.

8. API Secure by Data Theorem

Data Theorem’s API security solution provides tools to inventory, attack-simulate, and remediate issues, especially within CI/CD pipelines. Its engine continuously detects vulnerabilities, delivering real-time alerts and fixes across multi-cloud and on-premise environments. It identifies configuration flaws across applications and APIs, ensuring full operational visibility and automated remediation for IT and development teams.

This API scanning tool conducts security checks on authentication, authorization, encryption, availability, and auditing. It provides real-time compliance reports and detects CI pipeline vulnerabilities. With a continuous security approach, Data Theorem monitors threats beyond the perimeter, identifying shadow APIs and leaky data.

Key Features:

• Simulates threats and provides automated fixes, especially within CI/CD pipelines.
• Covers authentication, authorization, encryption, availability, and auditing.
• Secures APIs across cloud and on-prem environments.
• Identifies undocumented or unmonitored APIs to prevent data exposure.
• Ensures adherence to security standards and regulatory requirements.
• Detects and fixes misconfigurations for a streamlined security workflow.
• Tailored for infrastructure engineers, security teams, and developers to enhance collaboration.

How to Choose The Best API Penetration Testing Tool?

Here, we have listed some of the factors that you must consider to choose the right and best API security testing tool for you or your organization.

Prioritize Your Needs

As a penetration tester or a security expert, several questions need to be addressed while going for an API penetration testing tool.

• Why do I need API security scanning tool?
• What’s the primary features or functionalities I should consider?
• Do I need a free pentesting tool or paid one?
• What’s my ideal budget and pricing?
• Which compliance do I need to test for?

Answering the above questions helps outline your key goals, define non-negotiables, and set final cutoffs—clarifying the difference between essentials and nice-to-haves!

Consider the Coverage of Security

While choosing the best API security testing solution, you have to ensure that the tool covers a broad range of critical vulnerabilities, such as injection and broken authentication. You should not consider a tool that only provides protection against common threats.

User-Friendliness

The most essential parameter while choosing the best API pen testing tool is ease of use. A user-friendly tool should have an intuitive interface, clear documentation, and minimal setup requirements. This helps security experts and developers to perform scans without extensive training.

Authentication and Authorization Testing

API security heavily relies on authentication and authentication mechanisms. The API protection tool you choose should be capable of testing OAuth, JWT, API keys, and MFA to uncover weaknesses in access controls.

Why Choose ZeroThreat as Your Go-To Pentesting Tool for API?

ZeroThreat is designed to make penetration testing faster, smarter, and more effective by combining AI-driven automation with deep security insights. Here’s why ZeroThreat stands out as the best choice for modern security teams and developers:

1. Accurate Results with Near-Zero False Positives

ZeroThreat leverages AI-driven analysis to deliver 98.9% accurate vulnerability assessments. This ensures that security teams focus on real threats instead of wasting time on false positives.

2. Faster Vulnerability Detection – 10x Speed Improvement

With its advanced scanning engine, ZeroThreat identifies vulnerabilities 10x faster than traditional tools. This helps organizations stay ahead of evolving threats without slowing down development.

3. Comprehensive Testing for Modern Applications

From authenticated API testing to multi-factor authentication (MFA) support, ZeroThreat adapts to complex JavaScript-driven applications, SPAs, and all APIs, providing deep security assessments beyond surface-level scans.

4. Built on Zero Trust Principles

ZeroThreat follows a Zero Trust Architecture model, which ensures that every test is conducted with strict access controls and threat verification, reinforcing your security posture.

5. Lightweight, Cloud-Based, and Scalable

With a cloud-native architecture, ZeroThreat delivers high-performance pentesting without requiring heavy infrastructure. Whether for small teams or enterprise-scale applications, ZeroThreat scales effortlessly to meet your security needs.

Sign up now and start scanning for free now. Experience efficient, automated, and intelligent pentesting with ZeroThreat—your ultimate security partner.

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Final Thoughts

API security tools are essential for protecting the integrity and confidentiality of modern applications. They help identify and fix vulnerabilities early, strengthening defenses against attacks. Integrating these tools into the development process enhances API resilience, ensures compliance with security standards, and safeguards sensitive data from potential threats.