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Contrast Security Assess vs GitLab comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 2, 2025

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
30th
Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
27th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
GitLab
Ranking in Application Security Tools
8th
Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
91
Ranking in other categories
Build Automation (1st), Release Automation (2nd), Rapid Application Development Software (9th), Software Composition Analysis (SCA) (4th), Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (2nd), Fuzz Testing Tools (2nd), DevSecOps (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 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 GitLab is 2.1%, down from 3.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Security Tools Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
GitLab2.1%
Contrast Security Assess1.3%
Other96.6%
Application Security Tools
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1605099 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Threat and Vulnerability Management at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
We're gathering vulnerability data from multiple environments in real time, fundamentally changing how we identify issues in applications
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. Assess also provides the option of helping developers incorporate security elements while they're writing code. It depends on whether individual developers decide to utilize the information that's provided to them from the solution, but it definitely gives them visibility into more environments. It gives them an opportunity to remediate vulnerabilities well before production deployments.
BasilJiji - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Role-based workflows have transformed daily deployments and improve team collaboration
GitLab has role-based access control, so when a team member needs to make a code change, they cannot directly apply it to the environment but must put in a merge request. Once a senior reviews the code and approves it, then it is implemented across the environment, making it safer and allowing everyone to experience the process. The best features GitLab offers are version control and automation, which are the major things that stand out to me. When it comes to access, the login is very smooth, with just one login integrated with our Okta, allowing everyone to log in easily. Deployments become much easier, and that is how GitLab helps. The automation features make my work easier because we use a tool called AWX, which is connected to GitLab. Whenever we run a job on AWX, it directly checks the code and uses it. Since the code is not preserved locally but kept in the cloud, it is safe and nobody can tamper with it. When it comes to safety, that is a major thing. Automation features allow the code to be accessed from any tools we use, so the jobs we run are helping tremendously and doing their work perfectly. For pipeline tasks, we have created a significant amount of pipelines, which are all hosted in GitLab. Running the pipelines has become much easier, and they are doing a perfect job, helping tremendously in our day-to-day activities. GitLab has positively impacted my organization because previously we stored code locally on servers, leading to many risks. Since GitLab came into our environment, our integration and deployments became much easier, helping our work become much smoother. Improvements from GitLab have led to better team collaboration because when several people are working, they can all edit the code and submit it as a merge request, and once approved, it reflects directly to the main branch. Many can work at the same time. When it comes to deployments, deploying has become much faster since we started using GitLab, and even if errors occur, we can spot them easily and troubleshoot, which has helped tremendously.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Assess has an excellent API interface to pull APIs."
"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."
"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 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."
"In our most critical applications, we have a deep dive in the code evaluation, which was something we usually did with periodic vulnerability assessments, code reviews, etc. Now, we have real time access to it. It's something that has greatly enhanced our code's quality. We have actually embedded a KPI in regards to the improvement of our code shell. For example, Contrast provides a baseline where libraries and the usability of the code are evaluated, and they produce a score. We always aim to improve that score. On a quarterly basis, we have added this to our KPIs."
"When we access the application, it continuously monitors and detects vulnerabilities."
"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."
"We use the Contrast OSS feature that allows us to look at third-party, open-source software libraries, because it has a cool interface where you can look at all the different libraries. It has some really cool additional features where it gives us how many instances in which something has been used... It tells us it has been used 10 times out of 20 workloads, for example. Then we know for sure that OSS is being used."
"It's a great toolbox where the CI/CD pipeline is the fundamental component, but there are so many other features that you can pull from, which makes it a very powerful tool. My current client is using AWS, and they can, of course, use AWS CodePipeline, but GitLab is much more mature than that, and it also gives you the freedom to decide to go to another platform or have a multi-cloud strategy and things like that. That freedom for me is also very valuable."
"I have had no problem with the stability of the solution."
"The solution is stable."
"The SaaS setup is impressive, and it has DAST solutioning."
"It is scalable."
"The solution makes the CI/CD pipelines easy to execute."
"Their CI/CD engine is very mature. It's very comprehensive and flexible, and compared to other projects, I believe that GitLab is number one right now from that perspective."
"The code merging capability is something that we use very frequently."
 

Cons

"I would like to see them come up with more scanning rules."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution should provide more details in the section where it shows that third-party libraries have CVEs or some vulnerabilities."
"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."
"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."
"The out-of-the-box reporting could be improved. We need to write our own APIs to make the reporting more robust."
"I believe GitLab can be improved by making integration with other platforms a little easier."
"There are some challenges with repository file management as GitLab may struggle to manage larger files."
"As GitLab is not perfect, what needs improvement in the solution is the Wiki feature of the groups or the repertories because currently, it's not searchable by default. You'll need an indexing service such as Elasticsearch to make it searchable, and that requires too much work, so for me, it's the main feature that should be improved in GitLab. In the next version of the solution, from the top of my head, the documentation could be improved. Besides the Wiki, it would be good if there's documentation that would be automatically generated based on the code repository. In other words, there should be some tutorials from GitLab for developers in the next release."
"GitLab could add a plugin to integrate with Kubernetes stuff."
"GitLab doesn't have AWS integration. It would be better to have integration with other container management environments beyond Kubernetes. It has very good integration with Kubernetes, but it doesn't have good integration with, for example, AWS, ETS, etc."
"Technologies are always changing. Nowadays, new things like serverless computing and workload management have emerged. We have noticed a few gap items for faster service delivery. For example, we do user interface testing in the latest team and automate it using some tools. Recently, we integrated a tool with user interface testing, which can simulate a multi-user environment. So, we would like to see more integration with different platforms."
"You need to have a good knowledge of the product in order to use it."
"Perhaps the integration could be better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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 product's pricing is low. I would rate it a two out of ten."
"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."
"My company uses the free version of GitLab, which is GitLab Community Edition. There is a licensed version also available for GitLab."
"The price is okay."
"I don't mind the price because I use the free version."
"GitLab is a free solution to use."
"It seems reasonable. Our IT team manages the licenses."
"The solution is based on a subscription model and is reasonably priced."
"The initial setup cost is excellent and you can add the premium features later."
"I think that we pay approximately $100 USD per month."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
11%
 

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 Business36
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise46
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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What do you like most about GitLab?
I find the features and version control history to be most valuable for our development workflow. These aspects provide us with a clear view of changes and help us manage requests efficiently.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for GitLab?
The setup cost was moderate and not very high. For GitLab SaaS, the initial setup cost was minimal, while self-managed GitLab involved infrastructure, VM storage backups, runner configuration, and ...
What needs improvement with GitLab?
A pain point I have encountered with GitLab is that large GitLab-ci.yml files become hard to read and maintain. YAML syntax is strict, and errors are easy to make, while debugging pipeline logic ca...
 

Also Known As

Contrast Assess
Fuzzit
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Williams-Sonoma, Autodesk, HUAWEI, Chromeriver, RingCentral, Demandware.
1. NASA  2. IBM  3. Sony  4. Alibaba  5. CERN  6. Siemens  7. Volkswagen  8. ING  9. Ticketmaster  10. SpaceX  11. Adobe  12. Intuit  13. Autodesk  14. Rakuten  15. Unity Technologies  16. Pandora  17. Electronic Arts  18. Nordstrom  19. Verizon  20. Comcast  21. Philips  22. Deutsche Telekom  23. Orange  24. Fujitsu  25. Ericsson  26. Nokia  27. General Electric  28. Cisco  29. Accenture  30. Deloitte  31. PwC  32. KPMG
Find out what your peers are saying about Contrast Security Assess vs. GitLab and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
881,360 professionals have used our research since 2012.