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Fortify Static Code Analyzer pros and cons

Vendor: OpenText

4.1 out of 5

17 reviews
88% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

Fortify Static Code Analyzer is valued for its automation and integration with Jenkins, offering comprehensive documentation and flexible usage within DevOps. It efficiently identifies security vulnerabilities and provides quarterly rule updates. Benefits include extensive language support, Fortify Academy, and pricing value. Challenges involve adapting to new coding languages, high licensing fees, false positives, and file exclusion inconsistencies in IDEs like IntelliJ, with Python applications notably affected by noise.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Flexibility is highly valued as it can be implemented in various ways, fully automated within a DevOps pipeline or for ad hoc scenarios.

Excellent documentation and taxonomy provide detailed information on vulnerabilities and updates with rule packs released quarterly.

The ability to integrate seamlessly with CI/CD pipelines and various development tools, including IDEs and Jenkins, is a significant asset.

Fortify Software Security Center effectively combines security professionals and developers by integrating scan results for collaborative problem-solving.

It provides accurate detection of vulnerabilities, valuable best practices, and examples for fixing code issues, which enhances software security effectively.

CONS

Fortify Static Code Analyzer often generates false positives, complicating vulnerability prioritization.

Licensing costs for Fortify are high and can be prohibitive.

Excluding files from scans is problematic, particularly when using certain IDEs like IntelliJ.

Fortify struggles to support all programming languages, requiring updates to remain current.

The learning curve is steep, and users face challenges in effectively utilizing Fortify's features.

Fortify Static Code Analyzer Pros review quotes

AA

Sr cyber analyst at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

Oct 17, 2023

I like Fortify Software Security Center or Fortify SSC. This tool is installed on each developer's machine, but Fortify Software Security Center combines everything. We can meet there as security professionals and developers. The developers scan their code and publish the results there. We can then look at them from a security perspective and see whether they fixed the issues. We can agree on whether something is a false positive and make decisions.

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reviewer2317233

Vice President, Cybersecurity at Fiserv

Nov 30, 2023

The Software Security Center, which is often overlooked, stands out as the most effective feature.

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reviewer2322627

Security DevOps Engineer at V&J Associates

Dec 13, 2023

Automating the Jenkins plugins and the build title is a big plus.

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Fortify Static Code Analyzer

Free Report: Fortify Static Code Analyzer Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Fortify Static Code Analyzer. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2025.

848,253 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Maurizio Garofalo

Senior manager at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

Nov 21, 2023

It's helped us free up staff time.

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TH

Director of Security at Merito

Mar 10, 2021

Its flexibility is most valuable. It is such a flexible tool. It can be implemented in a number of ways. It can do anything you want it to do. It can be fully automated within a DevOps pipeline. It can also be used in an ad hoc, special test case scenario and anywhere in between.

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VF

Vincenzo Fioravanti

Software analyst at a financial services firm

Dec 6, 2023

The reference provided for each issue is extremely helpful.

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JB

Adjunct at University of Maryland

Nov 13, 2023

You can really see what's happening after you've developed something.

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DA

Sr DevOps Engineer at incatech

Jul 13, 2021

We write software, and therefore, the most valuable aspect for us is basically the code analysis part.

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Aphiwat Leetavorn.

CTO at Marco Technology

Mar 21, 2025

I recommend this product due to its good pricing, extensive language support, valuable features, and additional features like Fortify Academy.

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Vice President Application Security North America at BNP Paribas

Sep 5, 2023

The integration Subset core integration, using Jenkins is one of the good features.

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Fortify Static Code Analyzer Cons review quotes

AA

Sr cyber analyst at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

Oct 17, 2023

It can be tricky if you want to exclude some files from scanning. For instance, if you do not want to scan and push testing files to Fortify Software Security Center, that is tricky with some IDEs, such as IntelliJ. We found that there is an Exclude feature that is not working. We reported that to them for future fixing. It needs some work on the plugins to make them consistent across IDEs and make them easier.

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reviewer2317233

Vice President, Cybersecurity at Fiserv

Nov 30, 2023

Fortify's software security center needs a design refresh.

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reviewer2322627

Security DevOps Engineer at V&J Associates

Dec 13, 2023

Fortify Static Code Analyzer has a bit of a learning curve, and I don't find it particularly helpful in narrowing down the vulnerabilities we should prioritize.

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Fortify Static Code Analyzer

Free Report: Fortify Static Code Analyzer Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Fortify Static Code Analyzer. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2025.

848,253 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Maurizio Garofalo

Senior manager at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

Nov 21, 2023

Not all languages are supported in Fortify.

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TH

Director of Security at Merito

Mar 10, 2021

I know the areas that they are trying to improve on. They've been getting feedback for several years. There are two main points. The first thing is keeping current with static code languages. I know it is difficult because code languages pop up all the time or there are new variants, but it is something that Fortify needs to put a better focus on. They need to keep current with their language support. The second thing is a philosophical issue, and I don't know if they'll ever change it. They've done a decent job of putting tools in place to mitigate things, but static code analysis is inherently noisy. If you just take a tool out of the box and run a scan, you're going to get a lot of results back, and not all of those results are interesting or important, which is different for every organization. Currently, we get four to five errors on the side of tagging, and it notifies you of every tiny inconsistency. If the tool sees something that it doesn't know, it flags, which becomes work that has to be done afterward. Clients don't typically like it. There has got to be a way of prioritizing. There are a ton of filter options within Fortify, but the problem is that you've got to go through the crazy noisy scan once before you know which filters you need to put in place to get to the interesting stuff. I keep hearing from their product team that they're working on a way to do container or docker scanning. That's a huge market mover. A lot of people are interested in that right now, and it is relevant. That is definitely something that I'd love to see in the next version or two.

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VF

Vincenzo Fioravanti

Software analyst at a financial services firm

Dec 6, 2023

The price can be improved.

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JB

Adjunct at University of Maryland

Nov 13, 2023

Their licensing is expensive.

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DA

Sr DevOps Engineer at incatech

Jul 13, 2021

It comes with a hefty licensing fee.

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Aphiwat Leetavorn.

CTO at Marco Technology

Mar 21, 2025

The deployment of Fortify Static Code Analyzer needs to be simplified.

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Vice President Application Security North America at BNP Paribas

Sep 5, 2023

The generation of false positives should be reduced.

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Show 7 more reviews (out of 17)

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Popular Comparisons

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