Lonkero vs Nuclei vs Burp Suite_

Three scanners, three philosophies. Which one actually fits your workflow? An honest breakdown from someone who has used all three on real engagements.

Choosing a vulnerability scanner is not about picking "the best one." It is about matching the tool to the job. A bug bounty hunter grinding through targets has different needs than a pentest consultant delivering reports, and both differ from a DevSecOps team integrating scans into CI/CD.

This comparison covers Lonkero, Nuclei, and Burp Suite, three tools that approach web security scanning from fundamentally different angles. No marketing fluff, just practical differences that affect your daily work.

The Quick Overview

Architecture and Philosophy

Lonkero: Scan smart, not loud

Lonkero is built in Rust with async I/O, HTTP/2 support, and connection pooling. It detects your target's technology stack first, then only runs relevant modules. If your target runs Next.js, it skips PHP tests. If there is no GraphQL endpoint, GraphQL fuzzing does not fire.

This is the key difference: Lonkero does not blast every template at every target. It scans what matters. The result is fewer requests, faster scans, and significantly fewer false positives. For pentesters who need to deliver clean reports, this matters more than raw template count.

# Lonkero detects tech stack automatically
lonkero scan https://target.com

# Or target specific categories
lonkero scan https://target.com --modules xss,sqli,auth

# Full report in HTML
lonkero scan https://target.com -o report.html -f html

Nuclei: Template everything

Nuclei takes a different approach. It is a template engine. Every check is a YAML file that defines what to send and what to match. The power is in the community: over 9,000 templates covering CVEs, misconfigs, exposed panels, default credentials, and more.

The tradeoff is that Nuclei is a blunt instrument by default. It fires all matching templates against a target unless you curate your template set. This means more noise. The quality of results depends heavily on which templates you choose and how well they are written. Some community templates are excellent. Others produce false positives.

# Run all templates
nuclei -u https://target.com

# Filter by severity
nuclei -u https://target.com -severity critical,high

# Custom templates
nuclei -u https://target.com -t /path/to/custom/

Burp Suite: The manual testing workbench

Burp Suite is fundamentally different from both Lonkero and Nuclei. It is a proxy-based tool designed for interactive manual testing. You route your browser traffic through Burp, explore the application, and Burp scans what it sees. The scanner component is powerful but it is part of a larger manual testing workflow.

For deep manual pentesting, Burp is hard to beat. The Repeater, Intruder, and Comparer tools are mature. The extension ecosystem (BApps) adds capabilities like Autorize, Logger++, and dozens more. But Burp is slow for automated scanning at scale, and the Java-based UI can feel heavy compared to CLI tools.

Speed and Performance

This is where language choice shows up. Lonkero's Rust foundation with async concurrency makes it noticeably faster than both alternatives for automated scanning. In real-world testing, it typically finishes 3 to 5 times faster than Nuclei on equivalent scope, and significantly faster than Burp's active scanner.

Nuclei is reasonably fast in Go, but it sends more requests overall because it does not filter by technology. Scanning a Django app with 9,000 templates means a lot of irrelevant PHP, ASP.NET, and WordPress checks hitting the target. Lonkero's tech-aware approach sends a fraction of the requests.

Burp's active scanner is the slowest of the three for full-scope scanning. It is thorough in areas it covers, but it was designed for targeted manual testing, not mass automation. If you need to scan 50 targets overnight, Burp is not the right tool.

Detection Quality

Raw module or template count is a vanity metric. What matters is: does the scanner find real, exploitable issues, and does it avoid wasting your time with false positives?

Reporting and Output

Pentesters need deliverables. Bug bounty hunters need evidence. DevSecOps needs machine-readable output. Here is how each tool handles this:

Lonkero generates client-ready reports out of the box. PDF and HTML reports with OWASP and CVSS mapping mean you can hand them to a customer without post-processing. Nuclei outputs raw findings that you need to format yourself. Burp produces decent reports but the formatting is dated compared to modern expectations.

Cloud and Infrastructure

Modern targets are not just web apps. They run on cloud infrastructure with S3 buckets, Azure storage, API gateways, and serverless functions. Scanners vary in how deep they go here.

Burp was built for web application testing and has no cloud coverage. Nuclei has the deepest cloud scanning through its community templates covering AWS, Azure, and GCP config reviews in detail. Lonkero detects cloud assets like S3 buckets and Azure storage during web scans and has dedicated modules for Azure API Management, but does not go as deep as Nuclei on infrastructure-level cloud audits. For full cloud security posture assessment, Nuclei or dedicated tools like ScoutSuite are the better fit.

Pricing Reality Check

Nuclei is free and open source. That is its strongest selling point. For a solo bug bounty hunter or a startup with zero budget, the price is unbeatable.

Burp Suite Professional costs $475/year per user. That adds up quickly for teams. The Enterprise edition starts at $6,040/year and can reach $50,000+ depending on concurrent scans. For large organizations this is still reasonable, but it is a different budget category entirely.

Lonkero sits between these extremes. At €390/year for the Professional tier, it is comparable to Burp Pro but includes automated scanning, reporting, and cloud modules that Burp gates behind its Enterprise tier. The Team plan at €1,990/year covers multiple users, and Enterprise at €3,960/year includes all 121 modules. For a pentest consultancy, this is significantly cheaper than equivalent Burp Enterprise deployments.

Use Case Breakdown

Bug bounty hunting

If you are grinding targets on HackerOne or Bugcrowd, speed and coverage matter. Nuclei + Lonkero is a strong combo here. Nuclei catches the low-hanging fruit with its massive template library. Lonkero goes deeper on the targets that look interesting, finding business logic issues and framework-specific vulns that templates miss. Burp comes in for manual deep-dives on complex auth flows.

Professional pentesting

When you need to deliver a report to a client, Lonkero shines. Tech-aware scanning means less noise to triage. Built-in PDF/HTML reporting saves hours of post-processing. Low false positive rates mean you spend time on exploitation, not on confirming whether a finding is real. Pair it with Burp for manual testing of complex business logic.

DevSecOps / CI/CD

Both Lonkero and Nuclei integrate into pipelines via SARIF output. Lonkero's lower false positive rate is an advantage here because noisy scanners in CI/CD get disabled by frustrated developers. Nuclei's free pricing makes it easy to adopt, but you will need to maintain a curated template set to avoid alert fatigue.

Security teams / enterprise

Large teams typically need multiple tools. Burp Enterprise or ProjectDiscovery Cloud for centralized management, Lonkero for high-accuracy automated web scanning, and Nuclei templates for broad coverage including cloud infrastructure. The real question is budget: Lonkero Enterprise at €3,960/year delivers web scanning capabilities that would cost significantly more with Burp Enterprise alone.

The Honest Take

No single scanner covers everything. Here is the bottom line:

Choose Lonkero if you value accuracy over volume. If you are a pentester or consultant who needs clean findings, fast scans, client-ready reports, and cloud coverage without enterprise pricing, Lonkero delivers. Its tech-aware approach means fewer wasted cycles and less triage.

Choose Nuclei if you want maximum breadth at zero cost. If you have the skill to curate templates and filter noise, Nuclei's community-driven library is unmatched for sheer coverage. Best paired with other tools for confirmation.

Choose Burp Suite if manual testing is your primary workflow. For interactive exploration of complex web applications, intercepting and modifying requests, and deep manual analysis, Burp's proxy-based approach is still the gold standard.

Or do what most experienced testers do: use more than one.