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Contrast Security Assess vs Coverity Static comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 22, 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 Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
12th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Application Security Tools (25th)
Coverity Static
Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
17th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
43
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Static Application Security Testing (SAST) category, the mindshare of Contrast Security Assess is 1.4%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Coverity Static is 2.6%, down from 6.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Contrast Security Assess1.4%
Coverity Static2.6%
Other96.0%
Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
 

Featured Reviews

Ryan Flake - PeerSpot reviewer
Threat & Vulnerability Management Senior Analyst at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Real-time assessments have improved remediation speed and reduced time spent on authentication issues
I do find that here and there with Contrast Security Assess there are user interface issues, particularly with how they work with libraries. The way that it works is people have access to library data for all applications, not just the applications that they should have access to. However, they are trying to fix that. The way the libraries are handled with Contrast Security Assess could use some work. I know that there is an additional service tier that allows for more in-depth library data. These are small things. Contrast support has been great in fixing any issues or getting back to us with questions. They seem to really be dedicated to the product.
Jaile Sebes - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Resolving critical software issues demands faster implementation and better integration
We use Coverity primarily to find issues such as software bugs and memory leaks, especially in C++ and C# projects. It helps us identify deadlocks, synchronization issues, and product crashes Coverity has been instrumental in resolving product crashes by detecting various issues like deadlocks.…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"Contrast Security Assess has positively impacted my organization by providing a good way to find issues faster than regular static scanning, which after a while was unable to really find anything, giving us more visibility on the real code that is used in production along with the active DLLs that were loaded by our application in the backend, which helped us identify where the risk could be."
"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."
"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."
"When we access the application, it continuously monitors and detects vulnerabilities."
"You cannot get much better than Contrast Security Assess for large deployments of applications and also critical applications."
"No other tool does the runtime scanning like Contrast does. Other static analysis tools do static scanning, but Contrast is runtime analysis, when the routes are exercised. That's when the scan happens. This is a tool that has a very unique capability compared to other tools. That's what I like most about Contrast, that it's runtime."
"This has changed the way that developers are looking at usage of third-party libraries, upfront. It's changing our model of development and our culture of development to ensure that there is more thought being put into the usage of third-party libraries."
"Coverity gives advisory and deviation features, which are some of the parts I liked."
"If they have a cluster structure, then definitely they should use Coverity."
"The solution effectively identifies bugs in code."
"It has the lowest false positives."
"The solution has helped to increase staff productivity and improved our work significantly by approximately 20 percent."
"Coverity is quite stable and we haven’t had any issues or any downtime."
"The interface of Coverity is quite good, and it is also easy to use."
"Considering the analysis part and the benchmarking process involving the product that my company carried out, the solution is good for finding bugs and violations"
 

Cons

"I do find that here and there with Contrast Security Assess there are user interface issues, particularly with how they work with libraries."
"My primary hurdle is that it doesn't support all of the technologies that we use."
"The solution needs to improve flexibility...The scalability of the product is a problem in the solution, especially from a commercial perspective."
"Their level of support and troubleshooting for the product is limited because of how they handle troubleshooting. It's done through a log file that's very cumbersome to work with."
"Contrast's ability to support upgrades on the actual agents that get deployed is limited. Our environment is pretty much entirely Java. There are no updates associated with that. You have to actually download a new version of the .jar file and push that out to your servers where your app is hosted. That can be quite cumbersome from a change-management perspective."
"I would rate Contrast Security Assess a seven out of ten because I think it's a good product, better than average, but I'm sure it has a lot of room for growth."
"Contrast Security Assess covers a wide range of applications like .NET Framework, Java, PSP, Node.js, etc. But there are some like Ubuntu and the .NET Core which are not covered. They have it in their roadmap to have these agents. If they have that, we will have complete coverage."
"I think Contrast can also integrate with some AI tools and provide chat features if possible, so in case we have any more questions, we can chat with that chatbot and get remediations, which I believe would be a better enhancement to Contrast."
"It would be great if we could customize the rules to focus on critical issues."
"Reporting engine needs to be more robust. Custom reporting is a must have."
"It is an expensive solution. Their sales team is very arrogant."
"The solution's user interface and quality gate could be improved."
"We actually specified several checkers, but we found some checkers had a higher false positive rate. I think this is a problem. Because we have to waste some time is really the issue because the issue is not an issue. I mean, the tool pauses or an issue, but the same issue is the filter now.Some check checkers cannot find some issues, but sometimes they find issues that are not relevant, right, that are not really issues. Some customisation mechanism can be added in the next release so that we can define our Checker. The Modelling feature provided by Coverity helps in finding more information for potential issues but it is not mature enough, it should be mature. The fast testing feature for security testing campaign can be added as well. So if you correctly integrate it with the training team, maybe you can help us to find more potential issues."
"There is an extra step in my organization that involves uploading to servers, which adds overhead."
"They could improve the usability. For example, how you set things up, even though it's straightforward, it could be still be easier."
"The reporting tool integration process is sometimes slow."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's pricing is low. I would rate it a two out of ten."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"I rate Coverity's price a ten on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive."
"The licensing fees are based on the number of lines of code."
"I would rate the tool's pricing a one out of ten."
"Coverity is quite expensive."
"It is expensive."
"The pricing is on the expensive side, and we are paying for a couple of items."
"This is a pretty expensive solution. The overall value of the solution could be improved if the price was reduced. Licensing is done on an annual basis."
"The solution is affordable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Healthcare Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
26%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise31
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Contrast Security Assess?
I was not involved in the negotiation of pricing for Contrast Security Assess, but I am somewhat familiar with setup cost and licensing. Licensing costs are fairly high compared to other DAST and S...
What needs improvement with Contrast Security Assess?
I don't use Contrast Security Assess anymore, so I cannot comment on how it can be improved; I stopped using it four years ago, but at the time, I think the UI could be improved to be more friendly...
What advice do you have for others considering Contrast Security Assess?
I don't remember specific metrics regarding the outcomes we saw, but I can tell that the false positive rate was a third compared to a static analysis scanner; we used to have automation testing ex...
How would you decide between Coverity and Sonarqube?
We researched Coverity, but in the end, we chose SonarQube. SonarQube is a tool for reviewing code quality and security. It helps to guide our development teams during code reviews by providing rem...
What needs improvement with Coverity?
The price is a concern, and there are a lot of false positives coming through. Support with Coverity is adequate, but they take a longer time to respond. The core support is not straightforward, an...
 

Also Known As

Contrast Assess
Synopsys Static Analysis
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Williams-Sonoma, Autodesk, HUAWEI, Chromeriver, RingCentral, Demandware.
SAP, Mega International, Thales Alenia Space
Find out what your peers are saying about Contrast Security Assess vs. Coverity Static and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
917,382 professionals have used our research since 2012.