Top 5 Intercepting Proxy Tools for 2026: Burp Suite vs mitmproxy vs ZAP vs Proxyman vs Charles

An intercepting proxy is a tool that sits between an application and the network, decrypts the HTTPS traffic passing through, and lets you read it, replay it, and change it before it continues. It is how you find out what your application is really sending, as opposed to what you believe it sends.

Start with the uncomfortable part, because it is the important one. An intercepting proxy performs exactly the operation a man-in-the-middle attacker performs. It terminates the encrypted connection, presents a certificate it generated, and reads the plaintext. The client accepts this because you installed your own certificate authority on the device.

Nothing about the mechanism distinguishes testing from attacking. Two things outside the mechanism do:

1. You control the trust store. You installed the certificate authority yourself, on a device you own, deliberately.
2. You are authorized to inspect the endpoint. You own the application, or you hold written permission to test it.

That second point deserves more weight than it usually gets. Authorization covers the third-party services your application talks to as well, not only your own servers. If you are unsure whether you have it, you do not have it.

Choosing between the five

These tools split cleanly into two groups that are often compared as if they were one.

Comparing Burp against Proxyman on features is comparing a testing workbench against a debugging window. They are both proxies and they overlap in the middle, but the reason you reach for one is not the reason you reach for the other. Decide which question you are asking first, then pick from that row.

Two things changed recently that outdated comparisons still get wrong. ZAP is no longer an OWASP project; it is stewarded by Checkmarx and branded ZAP by Checkmarx, though it remains free and open source under Apache 2.0. And Proxyman is no longer macOS-only, now shipping desktop builds for Windows and Linux as well, which removes what used to be Charles's main structural advantage over it.

For the architecture behind all of this, including why TLS interception stops working entirely against pinned applications rather than degrading, see the proxy architecture and security guide.

This page ranks the tools. For the practice, meaning how to set interception up, what must never be inspected, and where it stops working entirely, see TLS Inspection with a Forward Proxy.

How these five were assessed

No benchmark was run for this comparison, and none would be meaningful. Interception throughput is not what separates these tools, and any comparison ranking them on requests per second is measuring something nobody chooses on.

What was assessed:

• Documented capability. Protocol support, scripting and automation surfaces, and scanner behaviour, taken from each project's own documentation rather than from third-party roundups.
• The job each tool is built for. Whether it exists to find vulnerabilities, to debug your own traffic, or to be programmed. This is the criterion that actually determines whether a tool will suit you, and it is weighted accordingly.
• Licence and price. Every price here was read from the vendor's own pricing page on 23 August 2026 and is stated with that date, because software pricing changes without notice and an undated price is worse than no price.
• Project stewardship. Who maintains the project and under what licence. This is included because it changed for one of the five, and out-of-date assumptions are still circulating.

What is deliberately not here

No how-to instructions. Setting up interception, installing a certificate authority correctly, and deciding what must never be inspected are covered in TLS inspection with a forward proxy. This page ranks tools; that guide explains the practice.

No corporate secure web gateways. Zscaler, Netskope, and their peers also intercept TLS, but they are fleet-wide policy platforms rather than engineer's workbench tools. They are compared in the SSE platforms roundup.

No network sniffers. Wireshark and tcpdump capture packets but do not terminate TLS, so they cannot show you encrypted application content. Different tool, different problem.

A limitation worth stating

Scanner quality claims in this comparison, specifically that Burp's scanner produces fewer findings needing triage than ZAP's, reflect the consistent consensus of practitioners and published evaluations rather than a controlled test run for this article. Scanner accuracy varies enormously by application, and the only assessment that reliably predicts your experience is running both against your own code.