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Fortify Application Defender vs GitGuardian Platform 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

Fortify Application Defender
Ranking in Application Security Tools
32nd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
GitGuardian Platform
Ranking in Application Security Tools
7th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (5th), Data Loss Prevention (DLP) (6th), Software Supply Chain Security (4th), DevSecOps (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Application Security Tools category, the mindshare of Fortify Application Defender is 0.7%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of GitGuardian Platform is 0.6%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Security Tools
 

Featured Reviews

HisaoOgata - PeerSpot reviewer
Saves time and warns about the vulnerabilities in the software, but the false positive rate should be lower
We use the solution to prevent cyberattacks Based on the alerts created by the solution during development, we modify the software we are developing. The product finds mistakes automatically. It warns us about the vulnerabilities in the software. The product saves us cost and time. The product…
Joan Ging - PeerSpot reviewer
It dramatically improved our ability to detect secrets, saved us time, and reduced our mean time to remediation
While they do offer some basic reporting, more comprehensive reporting would be beneficial in the long run. This would allow me to demonstrate the value of the product over time to continue to effectively budget for this subscription, especially as they add features that may come at an additional cost. I appreciate the improvements made to reporting over the past year, but continued development in this area will be appreciated. We have encountered occasional difficulties with the Single Sign-On process. There is room for improvement in its current implementation. It works, but was not quite as smooth as the rest of the GitGuardian experience.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I find the configuration of rules in Fortify Application Defender useful. Its integration is also easy."
"The tool's most valuable feature is software composition analysis. This feature works well with my .NET applications, providing a better understanding of library vulnerabilities."
"The product saves us cost and time."
"The solution helped us to improve the code quality of our organization."
"The most valuable features of Fortify Application Defender are the code packages that are default."
"Its ability to find security defects is valuable."
"The most valuable feature is that it analyzes data in real-time."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to automatically feed it rules what it's coupled with the WebInspect dynamic application scanning technology."
"GitGuardian Internal Monitoring has helped increase our secrets detection rate by several orders of magnitude. This is a hard metric to get. For example, if we knew what our secrets were and where they were, we wouldn't need GitGuardian or these types of solutions. There could be a million more secrets that GitGuardian doesn't detect, but it is basically impossible to find them by searching for them."
"You can also assign tasks to specific teams or people to complete, such as assigning something to the "blue team" or saying that this person needs to do this, and that person needs to do that. That is a great feature because you can actually manage your team internally in GitGuardian."
"The secrets detection and alerting is the most important feature. We get alerted almost immediately after someone commits a secret. It has been very accurate, allowing us to jump on it right away, then figure out if we have something substantial that has been leaked or whether it is something that we don't have to worry about. This general main feature of the app is great."
"It's also worth mentioning that GitGuardian is unique because they have a free tier that we've been using for the first twelve months. It provides full functionality for smaller teams. We're a smaller company and have never changed in size, but we got to the point where we felt the service brought us value, and we want to pay for it. We also wanted an SLA for technical support and whatnot, so we switched to a paid plan. Without that, they had a super-generous, free tier, and I was immensely impressed with it."
"GitGuardian has also helped us develop a security-minded culture. We're serious about shift left and getting better about code security. I think a lot of people are getting more mindful about what a secret is."
"GitGuardian has pretty broad detection capabilities. It covers all of the types of secrets that we've been interested in... [Yet] The "detector" concept, which identifies particular categories or types of secrets, allows an organization to tweak and tailor the configuration for things that are specific to its environment. This is highly useful if you're particularly worried about a certain type of secret and it can help focus attention, as part of early remediation efforts."
"I like that GitGuardian automatically notifies the developer who committed the change. The security team doesn't need to act as the intermediary and tell the developer there is an alert. The alert goes directly to the developer."
"The most valuable feature is the general incident reporting system."
 

Cons

"I encountered many false positives for Python applications."
"The biggest complaint that I have heard concerns additional platform support because right now, it only supports applications that are written in .NET and Java."
"Support for older compilers/IDEs is lacking."
"The licensing can be a little complex."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"The solution could improve the time it takes to scan. When comparing it to SonarQube it does it in minutes while in Fortify Application Defender it can take hours."
"Fortify Application Defender gives a lot of false positives."
"The product should integrate industry-standard code review tools internally with its system. This would streamline the coding process, as developers wouldn't need multiple tools for code review and security checks. Many independent and open-source tools are available, from Apache to various libraries. Using multiple DevOps pipeline tools can slow the turnaround time."
"They could give a developer access to a dashboard for their team's repositories that just shows their repository secrets. I think more could be exposed to developers."
"The main thing for me is the customization for some of the healthcare-specific identifiers that we want to validate. There should be some ability, which is coming in the near future, to have custom identifiers. Being in healthcare, we have pretty specific patterns that we need to match for PHI or PII. Having that would add a little bit extra to it."
"For some repositories, there are a lot of incidents. For example, one repository says 255 occurrences, so I assume these are 255 alerts and nobody is doing anything about them. These could be false positives. However, I cannot assess it correctly, because I haven't been closing these false positives myself. From the dashboard, I can see that for some of the repositories, there have been a lot of closing of these occurrences, so I would assume there are a lot of false positives. A ballpark estimate would be 60% being false positives. One of the arguments from the developers against this tool is the number of false positives."
"There is room for improvement in GitGuardian on Azure DevOps. The implementation is a bit hard there. This is one of the things we requested help with. I would not say their support is not good, but they need them to improve in helping customers on that side."
"Automated Jira tickets would be fantastic. At the moment, I believe we have to go in and click to create a Jira ticket. It would be nice to automate."
"We'd like to request a new GitGuardian feature that automates user onboarding and access control for code repositories."
"It took us a while to get new patterns introduced into the pattern reporting process."
"One of our current challenges is that the GitGuardian platform identifies encrypted secrets and statements as sensitive information even though they're secured."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing is very complex, it's project based and can range from $10,000 to $200,000+ depending on the project type and size."
"Fortify Application Defender is very expensive."
"The product’s price is much higher than other tools."
"I rate the solution's pricing a five out of ten. It comes as an annual cloud subscription. The tool's pricing is around 50 lakhs."
"The price of this solution could be less expensive."
"The base licensing costs for the SaaS platform is about $900 USD per application, per year."
"The pricing for GitGuardian is fair."
"GitGuardian is on the pricier side."
"I compared the solution to a couple of other solutions, and I think it is very competitively priced."
"The pricing is reasonable. GitGuardian is one of the most recent security tools we've adopted. When it came time to renew it, there was no doubt about it. It is licensed per developer, so it scales nicely with the number of repos that we have. We can create new repositories and break up work. It isn't scaling based on the amount of data it's consuming."
"It could be cheaper. When GitHub secrets monitoring solution goes to general access and general availability, GitGuardian might be in a little bit of trouble from the competition, and maybe then they might lower their prices. The GitGuardian solution is great. I'm just concerned that they're not GitHub."
"We don't have a huge number of users, but its yearly rate was quite reasonable when compared to other per-seat solutions that we looked at... Having a free plan for a small number of users was really great. If you're a small team, I don't see why you wouldn't want to get started with it."
"The pricing and licensing are fair. It isn't very expensive and it's good value."
"The internal side is cheap per user. It is annual pricing based on the number of users."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Government
9%
Computer Software Company
21%
Government
12%
Media Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Fortify Application Defender?
I find the configuration of rules in Fortify Application Defender useful. Its integration is also easy.
What needs improvement with Fortify Application Defender?
The product should integrate industry-standard code review tools internally with its system. This would streamline the coding process, as developers wouldn't need multiple tools for code review and...
What is your primary use case for Fortify Application Defender?
We use the solution for fast code review. It is integrated into our DevOps pipeline.
What do you like most about GitGuardian Internal Monitoring ?
It's also worth mentioning that GitGuardian is unique because they have a free tier that we've been using for the first twelve months. It provides full functionality for smaller teams. We're a smal...
What needs improvement with GitGuardian Internal Monitoring ?
We'd like to request a new GitGuardian feature that automates user onboarding and access control for code repositories. Ideally, when a user contributes to a repository, they would be automatically...
 

Also Known As

HPE Fortify Application Defender, Micro Focus Fortify Application Defender
GitGuardian Internal Monitoring
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ServiceMaster, Saltworks, SAP
Automox, 66degrees (ex Cloudbakers), Iress, Now:Pensions, Payfit, Orange, BouyguesTelecom, Seequent, Stedi, Talend, Snowflake... 
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortify Application Defender vs. GitGuardian Platform and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
847,862 professionals have used our research since 2012.