Contrast Security Assess vs Synopsys Defensics comparison

The compared Contrast Security and Black Duck solutions aren't in the same category. Contrast Security is ranked #24 in SAST , with an average rating of 8.7, and holds a 0.5% mindshare in the category. Black Duck is ranked #5 in FTT , and holds a 20.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Contrast Security users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Black Duck users who would recommend it.

Contrast Security Assess

Read 11 Contrast Security Assess reviews

872 Views
565 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Synopsys Defensics

Read 4 Synopsys Defensics reviews

136 Views
90 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Contrast Security Assess

Synopsys Defensics

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Contrast Security Assess and Synopsys Defensics based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Sonar, Veracode, Checkmarx and others in Static Application Security Testing (SAST).

To learn more, read our detailed Static Application Security Testing (SAST) Report (Updated: November 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

November 2024

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Helped 824,067 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

Contrast Security Assess

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Security Tools (28th), Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (24th)

Synopsys Defensics

Average Rating

8.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Fuzz Testing Tools (5th)

Mindshare comparison

While both are Quality Assurance solutions, they serve different purposes. Contrast Security Assess is designed for Static Application Security Testing (SAST) and holds a mindshare of 0.5%, down 0.5% compared to last year.
Synopsys Defensics, on the other hand, focuses on Fuzz Testing Tools, holds 20.5% mindshare, up 12.0% since last year.

Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

Fuzz Testing Tools

Featured Reviews

ToddMcAlister

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.

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it_user586716

Application Secutiy Engineer at a healthcare company with 11-50 employees

Technical support provided protocol-specific documentation to prove that some positives were not false.

A security assurance engineer was able to perform due diligence across all network-facing protocols. My prior organization designed, developed and deployed a Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliance. A key part of the company wide security assurance program for all products, is to perform penetration testing against all network facing IP ports. For the web, SSL and RESTful APIs, there are very good COTS and open source tools to perform Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) testing. Unfortunately for NAS protocols like SMB, NFS, CIFS, and iSCSI, I researched and found that Codenomicon Defensics was the only viable source to satisfy our DAST requirements. Through the use of Selenium for automated web testing, it was easily found out that Codenomicon Defensics could be integrated into our Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI / CD) Agile processes, specific to automated testing. Also, like many of the other application security testing products, Defensics incorporates automatic update support and works on Windows, MacOS and Linux desktops.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 has an excellent API interface to pull APIs."

More Contrast Security Assess pros

"Whatever the test suit they give, it is intelligent. It will understand the protocol and it will generate the test cases based on the protocol: protocol, message sequence, protocol, message structure... Because of that, we can eliminate a lot of unwanted test cases, so we can execute the tests and complete them very quickly."

"The product is related to US usage with TLS contact fees, i.e. how more data center connections will help lower networking costs."

"We have found multiple issues in our embedded system network protocols, related to buffer overflow. We have reduced some of these issues."

Cons

"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."

"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 solution needs to improve flexibility...The scalability of the product is a problem in the solution, especially from a commercial perspective."

"Regarding the solution's OSS feature, the one drawback that we do have is that it does not have client-side support. We'll be missing identification of libraries like jQuery or JavaScript, and such, that are client-side."

"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."

"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."

More Contrast Security Assess cons

"Codenomicon Defensics should be more advanced for the testing sector. It should be somewhat easy and flexible to install."

"It does not support the complete protocol stack. There are some IoT protocols that are not supported and new protocols that are not supported."

"Sometimes, when we are testing embedded devices, when we trigger the test cases, the target will crash immediately. It is very difficult for us to identify the root cause of the crash because they do not provide sophisticated tools on the target side. They cover only the client-side application... They do not have diagnostic tools for the target side. Rather, they have them but they are very minimal and not very helpful."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"Licensing is a bit expensive."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

20%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Government

Computer Software Company

21%

Manufacturing Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Contrast Security Assess?

When we access the application, it continuously monitors and detects vulnerabilities.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Contrast Security Assess?

The product's pricing is low. I would rate it a two out of ten.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Contrast Security Assess?

Technical support for the solution should be faster. We have to further analyze what kind of CVEs are in the reported libraries and what part of the code is affected. That analysis can be added to ...

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Also Known As

Contrast Assess

Defensics, Codenomicon Defensics

Learn More

Contrast Security

Black Duck

Overview

Contrast Security is the world’s leading provider of security technology that enables software applications to protect themselves against cyberattacks, heralding the new era of self-protecting software. Contrast's patented deep security instrumentation is the breakthrough technology that enables highly accurate assessment and always-on protection of an entire application portfolio, without disruptive scanning or expensive security experts. Only Contrast has sensors that work actively inside applications to uncover vulnerabilities, prevent data breaches, and secure the entire enterprise from development, to operations, to production.

Defensics® fuzz testing is a comprehensive, powerful, and automated black box solution that enables organizations to effectively and efficiently discover and remediate security weaknesses in software. By taking a systematic and intelligent approach to negative testing, Defensics allows organizations to ensure software security without compromising on product innovation, increasing time to market, or inflating operational costs.

Sample Customers

Williams-Sonoma, Autodesk, HUAWEI, Chromeriver, RingCentral, Demandware.

Coriant, CERT-FI, Next Generation Networks

Buyer's Guide

Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

November 2024

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