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Contrast Security Assess vs GitHub comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Contrast Security Assess
Ranking in Application Security Tools
29th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (27th)
GitHub
Ranking in Application Security Tools
5th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
97
Ranking in other categories
Version Control (3rd), Agile and DevOps Services (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Application Security Tools category, the mindshare of Contrast Security Assess is 1.3%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of GitHub is 1.5%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Security Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
GitHub1.5%
Contrast Security Assess1.3%
Other97.2%
Application Security Tools
 

Featured Reviews

ToddMcAlister - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Application and Data Security Engineer at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees
It has an excellent API interface to pull APIs.
Assess has brought our development time down because it helps create code the first time. Instead of going through the Jenkins process to build an application, they can see right off the bat that if there are errors in the code and fix them before it even goes to build.
Murathan OK - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Development Manager at a media company with 10,001+ employees
CI/CD workflows have become streamlined and AI support has improved collaborative development
We are using GitHub because it is open-source software, which is the most valuable solution for us. The open source and community support are very good. We are always up-to-date with the community, and integration difficulty is very low. If you integrate any CI/CD solutions on GitHub, it's very easy. We started using GitHub about three months ago with AI integration. For our deployments, some developers can be very shy about asking for descriptions on their commits. We are using AI support for comments and deployment management, which is beautiful. We are not using the GitHub API for automating workflows in our projects. I give GitHub a five-star rating for the review capabilities. I also give GitHub five stars for integration with third-party applications. There is a lot of integration available on GitHub. If you want to integrate something, even if it could be integrated before GitHub, you can make your code and integrate your own in-house applications. It's a very easy and powerful aspect of GitHub.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the continuous monitoring aspect: the fact that we don't have to wait for scans to complete for the tool to identify vulnerabilities. They're automatically identified through developers' business-as-usual processes."
"It is a stable solution...Contrast Security Assess is one of the first players in this market, so they have experience and customers, especially abroad. Overall, it's a good product."
"The accuracy of the solution in identifying vulnerabilities is better than any other product we've used, far and away. In our internal comparisons among different tools, Contrast consistently finds more impactful vulnerabilities, and also identifies vulnerabilities that are nearly guaranteed to be there, meaning that the chance of false positives is very low."
"One of the key takeaways is that in order to have a secure application, you cannot rely on just the pentest, vulnerability assessments, and the periodicity of the reviews; you need the real-time feedback on that, and Contrast Assess offers that."
"Assess has brought our development time down because it helps create code the first time."
"The time it saves us is on the order of one US-based FTE, a security person at an average pay level, and at a bare minimum Contrast helps us like that resource; it's like having a CISSP guy, in the US, on our payroll."
"Contrast was a very complete solution; it met all of our technical requirements and it was really the only IAST product that felt like a real product."
"The solution is very accurate in identifying vulnerabilities. In cases where we are performing application assessment using Contrast Assess, and also using legacy application security testing tools, Contrast successfully identifies the same vulnerabilities that the other tools have identified but it also identifies significantly more. In addition, it has visibility into application components that other testing methodologies are unaware of."
"The ability to track external changes to repositories we are using has been very useful for us."
"GitHub is pure or open-source; you can access it anywhere, you can have a lot of collateral information, and you can make the changes and do the reviews from one place."
"GitHub allows us the option to push files from a non-UA method or directly upload files from the UA. You can integrate GitHub with Jenkins to do CI/CD."
"GitHub has improved the productivity of my team by simplifying code merging and enabling effective branching strategies."
"Even if I'm not in the office, I can access and work on my code from anywhere with my account credentials."
"The product helps our team collaborate across different locations."
"There are no issues. It's simple, easy, and fully compatible from my perspective with Git."
"I use this solution to store my code in a repository so we can manage version control which is useful."
 

Cons

"I think there was activity underway to support the centralized configuration control. There are ways to do it, but I think they were productizing more of that."
"The product's retesting part needs improvement. The tool also needs improvement in the suggestions provided for fixing vulnerabilities. It relies more on documentation rather than on quick fixes."
"My primary hurdle is that it doesn't support all of the technologies that we use."
"To instrument an agent, it has to be running on a type of application technology that the agent recognizes and understands. It's excellent when it works. If we're using an application that is using an unsupported technology, then we can't instrument it at all. We do use PHP and Contrast presently doesn't support that, although it's on their roadmap. My primary hurdle is that it doesn't support all of the technologies that we use."
"Personalization of the board and how to make it appealing to an organization is something that could be done on their end."
"Personalization of the board and how to make it appealing to an organization is something that could be done on their end. The reports could be adaptable to the customer's preferences."
"The out-of-the-box reporting could be improved. We need to write our own APIs to make the reporting more robust."
"Regarding the solution's OSS feature, the one drawback that we do have is that it does not have client-side support."
"GitHub storage is one of the main requirements and it could improve."
"The user interface on GitLab is better."
"One area for improvement in GitHub could be integration with other tools, such as test management or project management tools."
"We would like this solution to have a more user-friendly interface."
"There could be more integration into Azure."
"There is a bit of a learning curve."
"The development team pushes the code into a repository, and the CI/CD pipeline will perform the build. We need open-source libraries to perform the builds. It would be helpful to have the ability to link to open-source libraries like npm libraries. I don't know if GitHub Actions provides this. I would like to see that in GitHub Actions if they don't."
"I'd like GitHub to become a more user friendly solution."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's pricing is low. I would rate it a two out of ten."
"The solution is expensive."
"For what it offers, it's a very reasonable cost. The way that it is priced is extremely straightforward. It works on the number of applications that you use, and you license a server. It is something that is extremely fair, because it doesn't take into consideration the number of requests, etc. It is only priced based on the number of onboarded applications. It suits our model as well, because we have huge traffic. Our number of applications is not that large, so the pricing works great for us."
"I like the per-application licensing model... We just license the app and we look at different vulnerabilities on that app and we remediate within the app. It's simpler."
"The good news is that the agent itself comes in two different forms: the unlicensed form and the licensed form. Unlicensed gives use of that software composition analysis for free. Thereafter, if you apply a license to that same agent, that's when the instrumentation takes hold. So one of my suggestions is to do what we're doing: Deploy the agent to as many applications as possible, with just the SCA feature turned on with no license applied, and then you can be more choosy and pick which teams will get the license applied."
"You only get one license for an application. Ours are very big, monolithic applications with millions of lines of code. We were able to apply one license to one monolithic application, which is great. We are happy with the licensing. Pricing-wise, they are industry-standard, which is fine."
"It's a tiered licensing model. The more you buy, as you cross certain quantity thresholds, the pricing changes. If you have a smaller environment, your licensing costs are going to be different than a larger environment... The licensing is primarily per application. An application can be as many agents as you need. If you've got 10 development servers and 20 production servers and 50 QA servers, all of those agents can be reporting as a single application that utilizes one license."
"The tool offers a free program. As you go, you can upgrade from the community version to the professional one. I believe it costs about ten dollars per person, per month."
"The basic licensing model is free, and if you need to have technical support and such things, then it does cost something. You only need to pay extra if you need technical support."
"I use the free version of the tool."
"The price of this solution is reasonable."
"I haven't had to pay anything for GitHub, I use the free version."
"You don't have to pay for a license if you are using the free version."
"There are no licensing fees for the features that we use."
"The product is reasonably priced."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Marketing Services Firm
11%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business42
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise50
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for GitHub?
I was paying approximately one hundred dollars annually about a year ago. I am uncertain of the current cost, but GitHub without Copilot is free as far as I know. I am not paying anything for my Gi...
What needs improvement with GitHub?
Security could make GitHub better. OWASP Top Ten security advisors could be integrated on GitHub, and it could provide checks and advice. That would be much better. Additionally, LLM integration on...
What is your primary use case for GitHub?
When discussing my use case, I don't know which vendors we are working with in that area, as it's not my area of responsibility right now. About six months ago, I was promoted to Software Developme...
 

Also Known As

Contrast Assess
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Williams-Sonoma, Autodesk, HUAWEI, Chromeriver, RingCentral, Demandware.
Dominion Enterprises, NASA, Braintree, SAP, CyberAgent
Find out what your peers are saying about Contrast Security Assess vs. GitHub and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,667 professionals have used our research since 2012.