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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

"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."
"When we access the application, it continuously monitors and detects vulnerabilities."
"It has helped us to improve the overall security posture of the company, we are able to address the findings before they have been reported by a third-party, and it has also helped us to gain our customers' trust."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"By far, the thing that was able to provide value was the immediate response while testing ahead of release, in real-time."
"You cannot get much better than Contrast Security Assess for large deployments of applications and also critical applications."
"Coverity integrates with issue-tracking systems like Jira and provides email notifications, alerts, and other features."
"If you have enough budget, it is one of the best solutions right now."
"The security analysis features are the most valuable features of this solution."
"It help us identify the latest security vulnerabilities."
"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"
"The solution was very simple to set up."
"The features I find most valuable is that our entire company can publish the analysis results into our central space."
"The most valuable feature is the integration with Jenkins."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."
"Regarding Contrast Security Assess's AI capabilities, I think they are missing a huge opportunity because they could lead the way in automatic testing and AI security testing, but currently, they do not offer this functionality, which is a shame."
"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."
"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. The reports could be adaptable to the customer's preferences."
"The setup takes very long."
"Coverity concerns its dashboards and reporting."
"It is an expensive solution. Their sales team is very arrogant."
"I am not a fan of using both SOAP and REST APIs and Coverity offers a mix of functionality depending on the interface used."
"I had tried integrating the tool with Azure DevOps, but the report I got stated that my team faced many challenges."
"Coverity's implementation cycle is very slow when integrating changes, especially for problems related to event handling and memory leaks."
"The tool needs to improve its reporting."
"They could improve the usability. For example, how you set things up, even though it's straightforward, it could be still be easier."
 

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."
"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."
"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."
"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 is expensive."
"The pricing is on the expensive side, and we are paying for a couple of items."
"The licensing fees are based on the number of lines of code."
"The solution's pricing is comparable to other products."
"The tool was fairly priced."
"The tool's price is somewhere in the middle. It's neither cheap nor expensive. I would rate the pricing a five out of ten."
"Coverity’s price is on the higher side. It should be lower."
"The pricing is very reasonable compared to other platforms. It is based on a three year license."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Healthcare Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
25%
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.
918,614 professionals have used our research since 2012.