Kali Linux vs. PortSwigger Burp Suite

Kali Linux is especially well suited in environments where high security is needed for your custom developed applications. This is well suited for offensive testing your high security in house developed applications. It is also very good for doing penetration testing on in house developed applications and safe guarding them from external attackers. Kali Linux is tough for use as a day to day Linux operating system as this was never intended to be used by beginners and occasional Linux users.

Incentivized

It's great for intercepting and changing login request. For one client i had done testing of their website, and after intercepting and changing the request, I got IDOR vulnerability and it's a very high vulnerability i gave it in the report, and with the BAPP store, I downloaded the IIS TILDE enumeration and got a vulnerability.

Incentivized

• Analyzing SSL certificates
• Analyzing SSL server configurations
• Vulnerability scanning
• Port scanning

Incentivized

• The passive scan feature is really awesome, it kind of covers areas that you might miss.
• The CSRF POC is really helpful to my team. It helps development team see the issue and understand it.
• Burp intruder and repeater are the features I myself and my team uses the most as it helps us use our payloads in a variety of different ways.
• Active scan helps the team to ensure coverage for the whole application.

• Usage wise, it is tough for use by beginners. Can be improved.
• With Kali Linux have noticed driver related issues especially with Nvidia graphics cards.
• Kali Linux can be improved for use as a day to day OS.

Incentivized

• The interface is a big problem: No matter how many features a software provides you, if the features are not well presented, you will miss most of them when they are actually required. The presentation of the software should be improvised and made more presentable.
• Tutorial videos for beginners: This software lacks a lot in tutorials. A beginner almost wastes most of the time in finding and understanding the features and the implementation of the same. The software vendor should work on providing more in-depth videos so that people can learn and understand the concepts.

Incentivized

Easy to use once you learn it; however, the user interface is not very intuitive at first view. Port Swigger does provide a lot of video resources for self-paced learning which helps. Most of the end users for PortSwigger Burp Suite will be technical and should be able to learn the product with the free resources.

Incentivized

BurpSuite does not have an amazing customer support. All the major help that you will find is from public forums and Google. Although you will find all the required information on Google, still at time professional support helps you solve the problem in much less time and make your operations go smoothly.

Incentivized

I would say the number one competitor to Kali is Parrot OS. While they both do the same/similar things, both have over 600 pre-loaded tools. Parrot does use some more offer what may be considered a more intuitive user interface. Parrot OS has been around for longer than people think and still has active development a support. But Kali is used more broadly in Training sessions, demos and is considered to be form all the articles I have read, the gold standard for penetration testing and tool sets

Incentivized

Burp Suite stacks up fairly well against these other two products both of which are quite expensive to license. The best other product I would suggest is OWASP Zed Attack Proxy or ZAP. It performs quite well and the cost of the product is free. ZAP is an Open Source product. If, however, you do not want to use an open source product I would either go with Burp Suite or look into the more expensive Rapid7 AppSpider.

Incentivized

• Initial stages of figuring out back doors in an application hence making them secure.
• ROI is good as it reduces in production security threats by letting us know well in advance.
• Entire development team along with its designers get a huge sigh of relief as all security holes are sealed well in advance before going into production.

Incentivized

• Scanned 100% of the orgs public facing web sites with a small team of analysts.
• Provided a reputable second opinion source to back up the other product in use i.e. Webinspect.
• Pro version $350 is amazing ROI, considering the thwarted attacks and that it's competition is priced in the tens of thousands last I checked.
• No successful hacks. Q.E.D. :-)

Incentivized