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Contrast Security Assess vs Coverity Static comparison

 

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)
21st
Average Rating
8.6
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)
12th
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 August 2026, in the Static Application Security Testing (SAST) category, the mindshare of Contrast Security Assess is 1.3%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Coverity Static is 2.5%, down from 7.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Coverity Static2.5%
Contrast Security Assess1.3%
Other96.2%
Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
 

Featured Reviews

Eucharia Okafor - PeerSpot reviewer
Dev Ops Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Continuous in-app security has transformed our development workflow and has reduced manual checks
Contrast Security Assess changes how the team thinks about security. Instead of us waiting for a security audit at the end of any sprint, vulnerabilities surface as developers are writing and testing code. That shift is significant because fixing a bug in development costs more than fixing it later. It captures everything right there and remediates it because it catches vulnerability and remediates immediately while the application is running. It improves our collaboration between development and security teams, as developers get clear actionable findings immediately. We get continuous visibility into our application risk posture. Ultimately, it helps us to shift fast and save money, which is usually a trade-off, but Contrast Security Assess makes both possible. The feature that stands out most to me in Contrast Security Assess is the ability to capture vulnerability while the application is running. Another standout feature is the real-time detection that finds vulnerabilities as code runs. It has fewer false positives and works continuously in the application; you install it and it is there. It captures issues during development quickly and is easily integrated with a CI/CD pipeline, especially if you are using GitLab or GitHub. The real-time detection feature of Contrast Security Assess helps us very well compared to traditional SAST tools. Traditional tools scan from the outside and guess where problems might be. Contrast Security Assess works from the inside because it is embedded into the application. The agent lives inside the running application, allowing it to see exactly what is happening in real-time. This means we are getting accurate alerts instead of a long list of potential issues that require manual investigation. When it comes to the CI/CD pipeline, Contrast Security Assess really shines for our daily work, as it plugs directly into tools like Jenkins, GitHub, or Azure DevOps. When a developer commits code and triggers a build, Contrast Security Assess is already testing it in the background. If there is any vulnerability, the pipeline automatically flags or stops the application before bad code reaches production. This means security becomes everyone's responsibility, not just the security team's, and it gives us real-time, accurate security that fits into how our team already works.
SP
Lead Information Security at GEP Worldwide at ReBIT
Helps us identify security vulnerabilities in the development phase and provides a plugin for the developer IDE
The initial setup is good. When I use the product to scan the code in the DevOps pipeline, the issue coverage can be greater, which can help speed up risk identification in the CI/CD pipeline. That is one area where improvement can be made. Corresponding steps can be taken for that. It integrates with most of the tools, like ticketing tools, configuration tools, Jenkins, and the pipeline. That is fantastic.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"You cannot get much better than Contrast Security Assess for large deployments of applications and also critical applications."
"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."
"Contrast Security Assess has positively impacted my organization by providing more control over secure software development."
"I am impressed with the product's identification of alerts and vulnerabilities."
"The accuracy of the solution in identifying vulnerabilities is better than any other product we've used, far and away."
"From a percentage perspective, somewhere around 90 percent of the time we used to spend has been given back to our team, because the false positive rate with Contrast is less than 5 percent."
"Assess has brought our development time down because it helps create code the first time."
"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."
"The product has deeper scanning capabilities."
"The security analysis features are the most valuable features of this solution."
"In my opinion, the most effective Coverity feature for identifying critical vulnerabilities is the extra checks, which offers deep analysis."
"The most valuable feature is that there were not a whole lot of false positives, at least on the codebases that I looked at."
"It provides reports about a lot of potential defects."
"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"
"Coverity provides developers with a good, best practice, coding advice, and tracks risks of poor coding quality."
"The tool as it is can be used for code quality improvement."
 

Cons

"I would like to see them come up with more scanning rules."
"I do find that here and there with Contrast Security Assess there are user interface issues, particularly with how they work with libraries."
"Contrast Security Assess could improve in the reporting and the dashboard experience."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The setup of the solution is different for each application. That's the one thing that has been a challenge for us. The deployment itself is simple, but it's tough to automate because each application is different, so each installation process for Contrast is different."
"It should be easier to specify your own validation routines and sanitation routines."
"My personal opinion is that the webpage of the last version of Coverity is not very easy to use."
"Coverity could improve the ease of use. Sometimes things become difficult and you need to follow the guides from the website but the guides could be better."
"Right now, the Coverity executable is around 1.2GB to download. If they can reduce it to approximately 600 or 700MB, that would be great. If they decrease the executable, it will be much easier to work in an environment like Docker."
"They could improve the usability. For example, how you set things up, even though it's straightforward, it could be still be easier."
"Their technical support isn't so good. That needs improvement. They don't address the problems I bring up. It's not a priority for them."
"Coverity is far from perfection, and I'm not 100 percent sure it's helping me find what I need to find in my role. We need exactly what we are looking for, i.e. security errors and vulnerabilities. It doesn't seem to be reporting while we are changing our code."
"We're currently facing a primary challenge with automation using Coverity. Each developer has a license and can perform manual checks, and we also have a nightly build that analyzes the entire software. The main issue is that the tool can't look behind submodules in our code base, so it doesn't see changes stored there."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"The product's pricing is low. I would rate it a two out of ten."
"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 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 pricing is on the expensive side, and we are paying for a couple of items."
"Depending on the usage types, one has to opt for different types of licenses from Coverity, especially to be able to use areas like report viewing or report generation."
"Coverity’s price is on the higher side. It should be lower."
"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 tool's price is somewhere in the middle. It's neither cheap nor expensive. I would rate the pricing a five out of ten."
"The licensing fees are based on the number of lines of code."
"The price is competitive with other solutions."
"I rate Coverity's price a ten on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
28%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Comms Service Provider
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise10
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?
Regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing, the annual licensing for Contrast Security Assess costs about $20,000 to $100,000 per year, and per application, it costs about $5,000 to $15,000 per y...
What needs improvement with Contrast Security Assess?
Contrast Security Assess could improve in the reporting and the dashboard experience. While the data is there, pulling together an executive-level summary requires too much manual work. I would lov...
What advice do you have for others considering Contrast Security Assess?
The biggest production gain from Contrast Security Assess is the reduced costs and overhead within my company. Security feedback comes to developers instantly with Contrast Security Assess, reducin...
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: August 2026.
908,402 professionals have used our research since 2012.