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Contrast Security Assess vs Veracode 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
27th
Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
23rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Veracode
Ranking in Application Security Tools
2nd
Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
194
Ranking in other categories
Container Security (5th), Software Composition Analysis (SCA) (2nd), Penetration Testing Services (3rd), Static Code Analysis (1st), Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Application Security Tools category, the mindshare of Contrast Security Assess is 0.5%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Veracode is 10.2%, down from 11.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Security Tools
 

Featured Reviews

ToddMcAlister - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
AkashKhurana - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to configure, stable, and good vulnerability detection
Veracode's ability to prevent vulnerable code from being deployed into production is crucial. Typically, if a dependency we use has security issues or concerns, Veracode suggests upgrading to a more secure version. For example, if we're using a PayPal dependency with version 1.3 and it has a security bug, Veracode suggests upgrading to version 1.4 which fixes the issue. We usually make our project compatible with version 1.4, but sometimes Veracode recommends removing the dependent code altogether and adding the updated dependency from another repository. Veracode provides suggestions for resolving security issues and we implement them in our code after resolving any conflicts. We run the Veracode scan again and if it fails, we do not deploy the code to production. This is critical as it ensures that security issues such as bugs and fixes are addressed. Veracode consistently assists us in identifying security issues in third-party dependencies, while also ensuring the maintenance of code quality. Preventing security bugs and threats in our code improves the overall code quality of our company, which is essential given the significant concerns surrounding security today. Veracode's policy reporting is helpful for ensuring compliance with industry standards and regulations. Veracode's solution plays a major role in achieving compliance, including HIPAA compliance. Without Veracode scans, identifying security threats and third-party dependencies would be a tedious task for DevOps professionals. Veracode provides visibility into the status of our application during every phase of development, including continuous integration and continuous development CI/CD pipeline stages. This includes builds, package creation for deployment, and various enrollment stages such as develop, queue, stage, above, and production enrollment. Prior to each stage, a Veracode scan is run. This can be accessed through Jenkins or the CI/CD pipeline by clicking on the Veracode scan option, which provides a detailed report highlighting any security issues and concerns. Veracode performs statistical analysis, dynamic analysis, software composition analysis, and manual penetration tests throughout our software development life cycle. Veracode scans not only for third-party security issues but also for possible issues in our own code. This occurs in every phase of development, including the SDLC. For example, if we use an encryption algorithm with a private or public key that is easy to decode, Veracode will identify this as an error or warning in the report and suggest using multiple layers of encryption for the keys. The entire CI/CD process is part of DevOps. Therefore, the responsibility of configuring the Veracode tool usually falls on the DevOps professional. It is essential to integrate Veracode with the CI/CD pipeline within the project to ensure it is always incorporated. Whenever there is a priority or mandatory check required before deployment, Veracode should run beforehand. This integration is carried out by our DevSecOps team. Veracode's false positive rate is good, as it helps us identify possible security concerns in our code. In my opinion, it is advisable to run a Veracode scan on all codes. I have worked in the IT industry for five years, and I have observed that Veracode has been implemented in every project I have worked on. If a tool is improving our code quality and providing us with insights into potential security issues, it is always beneficial to use it. The false positive rate boosts our developers' confidence in Veracode when addressing vulnerabilities. Veracode also provides suggestions when there is a security issue with a dependency in version 1.7, prompting us to consider using version 1.8, which does not have security issues. This process involves the developers, and it leaves a positive impression on our managers and clients, demonstrating our commitment to security. We can show them that we were previously using version 1.7 but updated to version 1.8 after identifying the security issue with Veracode's help. Unfortunately, there is no centralized platform to check for network issues or problems with dependencies and versions. Veracode provides a centralized solution where we can scan our project and receive results. Veracode has helped our organization address flaws in our software and automation processes. Its positive impact has been reflected in our ROI, which increased when we started using Veracode. Without Veracode, we would be susceptible to security issues and potential hacking. However, after implementing Veracode scans, we have not encountered any such problems. It is critical for us to use Veracode because we capture sensitive data such as pharmacy information for real-time users, including patient prescriptions and refill schedules. This sensitive data could pose a significant problem if our code or software has security vulnerabilities. Fortunately, Veracode scans allow us to prevent such issues. Veracode has helped our developers save time by providing a solution that eliminates the need to manually check for dependencies or search the internet for information on which dependencies have issues. Instead, Veracode provides a detailed report that identifies the issues and recommends the appropriate version to use. Using Veracode ensures the quality of our code and also saves time for our developers. In my career of five years, Veracode has helped me resolve code issues eight times. Veracode has reduced our SecOps costs by identifying security vulnerabilities in our code. Without Veracode, if we were to go live with these issues, it could result in a breach of our encrypted data, potentially causing significant harm to our organization. This would require significant time and cost to resolve the issue and restore the data. Veracode has improved the quality of our code and reduced the risk of such incidents occurring, thereby minimizing their impact on our organization.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the continuous monitoring aspect: the fact that we don't have to wait for scans to complete for the tool to identify vulnerabilities. They're automatically identified through developers' business-as-usual processes."
"I am impressed with the product's identification of alerts and vulnerabilities."
"When we access the application, it continuously monitors and detects vulnerabilities."
"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."
"Assess has an excellent API interface to pull APIs."
"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."
"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."
"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 most valuable feature is detecting security vulnerabilities in the project."
"The most valuable features are that you can do static analysis and dynamic analysis on a scheduled basis and that you can push the findings into JIRA."
"Veracode has a nice API that they provide to allow for custom things to be built, or automation. We actually have integrated Veracode into our software development cycle using their API. We actually are able to automatically, every time a new build of a software is completed, submit that application, kick off a scan, and we get results in a much more automated fashion."
"My experience with Veracode across the board every time, in all products, the technology, the product, the service, and the salespeople is fabulous."
"I like Veracode's integration with our CI/CD. It automatically scans our code when we do the build. It can also detect any security flaws in our third-party libraries. Veracode is good at pinpointing the sections of code that have vulnerabilities."
"The CI/CD integration is the most valuable feature of Veracode."
"The best feature is definitely the detailed reports. It provides code-related queries in the order of high, medium, and low depending on what we need to do. Veracode is user-friendly as well."
"Code analysis tool to help identify code issues before entered into production."
 

Cons

"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 solution needs to improve flexibility...The scalability of the product is a problem in the solution, especially from a commercial perspective."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see them come up with more scanning rules."
"The out-of-the-box reporting could be improved. We need to write our own APIs to make the reporting more robust."
"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."
"There is room for improvement in documentation."
"The scanning on the UI portion of our applications is straightforward, but folks were having challenges with scans that involved microservices. They had to rope in an expert to have it sorted."
"There were some additional manual steps or work involved that we should not have needed to do."
"Sometimes, I get feedback from a developer saying, "They are scanning a Python code, but getting feedback around Java code." While the remediation and guidelines are there, improvement is still required, e.g., you won't get the exact guidelines, but you can get some sort of a high-level insights."
"I would like to see more technical support for some of the connectors, some more detailed diagrams or run-books on how to install some of stuff; more hand-holding in the sense of understanding our environment."
"We get some false positives with JavaScript languages like React, TypeScript, and Angular. The problem is rooted in the build process of JavaScript, not the code we are using. This is something we spend lots of time trying to resolve. When we point to a specific library and review that on the code, we can see it is a part of the build that isn't going into production. It's only a part of the build because JavaScript has a different build process."
"There are few languages that take time for scanning. It covers the majority of languages from C to Scala, but it doesn't support certain languages and the newer versions of certain languages. For example, it doesn't support SAP and new JavaScript frameworks such as Node.js and React JS. They can include support for these. If you go to their website, you can see the list of languages that are currently supported. The false-positive rates are also something they can work on."
"Sometimes we get a lot of false positives even after configuring our policies, so that could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It is very reasonably priced compared to what we were paying our previous vendor. For the same price, we are getting much more value and reducing our AppSec costs from 40 to 50 percent."
"The product’s price is a bit higher compared to other solutions."
"I think it's a great value. It's at a price point that a small company like mine can afford to use versus, if it was too exorbitant, I wouldn't be able to use this product. The cost of the license is small in comparison to the value it brings"
"Veracode is expensive. But the solution is worth it."
"Negotiate some, but their prices are reasonable."
"The pricing is fair. You get a lot out of the product."
"We are still considering it at the enterprise level. It has a subscription-based model. We find its price a little high based on the features it provides."
"The licensing cost for Veracode is fair."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Contrast Security Assess?
When we access the application, it continuously monitors and detects vulnerabilities.
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.
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 ...
Which gives you more for your money - SonarQube or Veracode?
SonarQube is easy to deploy and configure, and also integrates well with other tools to do quality code analysis. SonarQube has a great community edition, which is open-source and free. Easy to use...
What do you like most about Veracode?
The SAST and DAST modules are great.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Veracode?
The product’s price is a bit higher compared to other solutions. However, the tool provides good vulnerability and database features. It is worth the money.
 

Also Known As

Contrast Assess
Crashtest Security , Veracode Detect
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Williams-Sonoma, Autodesk, HUAWEI, Chromeriver, RingCentral, Demandware.
Manhattan Associates, Azalea Health, Sabre, QAD, Floor & Decor, Prophecy International, SchoolCNXT, Keap, Rekner, Cox Automotive, Automation Anywhere, State of Missouri and others.
Find out what your peers are saying about Contrast Security Assess vs. Veracode and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.