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Contrast Security Assess vs PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 8, 2024

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
31st
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
PortSwigger Burp Suite Prof...
Ranking in Application Security Tools
6th
Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
65
Ranking in other categories
Fuzz Testing Tools (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Application Security Tools category, the mindshare of Contrast Security Assess is 1.5%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional is 2.8%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Security Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional2.8%
Contrast Security Assess1.5%
Other95.7%
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.
MH
Penetration Tester & Information Security Expert at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees
Dedicated browser and repeater have improved my proxy testing and manual vulnerability checks
I'm hoping perhaps for something to make it easier, such as to define things where if a message or a response is such and such, automatically make a request that is such and such. Perhaps something like this because otherwise, nowadays we have to do it manually. Perhaps they can automate it a bit more. Perhaps they could add some automation to things, to see what we do manually, which it has the tools to do manually, and perhaps enable with a click of a button to do things automatically. I'm not too sure which, but I'm sure they can from a product management point of view, do things that we need to do two, three, or four steps manually regarding specific testing. For instance, we want to check something specific if it's this or if it's that. Perhaps to define it once and have it more automatic, perhaps.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"When we access the application, it continuously monitors and detects vulnerabilities."
"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."
"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."
"By far, the thing that was able to provide value was the immediate response while testing ahead of release, in real-time."
"Overall, the product is strong and improving, support is responsive and effective, and supported integrations work for many customers."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I have found this solution has more plugins than other competitors which is a benefit. You are able to attach different plugins to the security scan to add features. For example, you can check to see if there are any payment systems that exist on a server, or username and password brute force analysis."
"Burp is the best web application penetration testing tool that I have ever used."
"For pentesting scenarios, this is the number one tool, as it can capture the request and there are so many functions that are very good for that, for example, a black box satellite host."
"I have found the best features to be the performance and there are a lot of additional plugins available."
"I find all the features of PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional most useful, particularly the AI enhancement for results and follow-up for retests."
"The Spider is the most useful feature. It helps to analyze the entire web application, and it finds all the passes and offers an automated identification of security issues."
"The most valuable feature is Burp Collaborator."
"It was easy to learn."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 Auto Scanning features should be updated more frequently and should include the latest attack vectors."
"The price could be better. The rest is fine."
"There is a lot to this product, and it would be good if when you purchase the tool, they can provide us with a more extensive user manual."
"BurpSuite has some issues regarding authentication with OAT tokens that need to be improved."
"There is not much automation in the tool."
"Integration is a big problem."
"There is a certain amount of lead time for the tickets to get resolved."
"One area for improvement is the integrated browser, Chromium. Single Sign-On (SSO) methods like Microsoft authentication login sometimes fail and show errors. As a workaround, I have to use a different browser, such as Firefox, to log in and make Burp work."
 

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."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"I rate the pricing a four out of ten."
"The pricing of the solution is reasonable. We only need to pay for the annual subscription. I rate the pricing five out of ten."
"The yearly cost is about $300."
"They should reduce the license cost a little bit. It is $400 per user, and it would be better if they could reduce the licensing fee."
"We have one license. The price is very nominal."
"It is a cheap solution, but it may not be cheaper than other solutions."
"We pay a yearly licensing fee for the solution, which is neither cheap nor expensive."
"The price for the solution is expensive and could be cheaper. We pay an annual license and our team has several of them."
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Top Industries

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

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 Business17
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise35
 

Questions from the Community

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Is OWASP Zap better than PortSwigger Burp Suite Pro?
OWASP Zap and PortSwigger Burp Suite Pro have many similar features. OWASP Zap has web application scanning available with basic security vulnerabilities while Burp Suite Pro has it available with ...
What do you like most about PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional?
The solution helped us discover vulnerabilities in our applications.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional?
The cost of PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional is reasonable at approximately $500 per year per user.
 

Also Known As

Contrast Assess
Burp
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Williams-Sonoma, Autodesk, HUAWEI, Chromeriver, RingCentral, Demandware.
Google, Amazon, NASA, FedEx, P&G, Salesforce
Find out what your peers are saying about Contrast Security Assess vs. PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
890,124 professionals have used our research since 2012.