CAST Highlight Reviews

I have been using CAST Highlight for the last four years. In my company, we use CAST Highlight to perform testing for our code to find vulnerabilities and license risks. We also use CAST Highlight for the Smart Accept picker to scan peer reviews, case studies, and product feedback.

One use case is Intent Matching, which means we match review text to topics such as ease of use, ROI, and customer support. Another use case involves pulling exact quotes and attributing them to the reviewer role, company size, and industry. Additionally, CAST Highlight helps us to scan for scalability.

Before deploying our project in a client environment, we first check our current code or project within CAST Highlight, so that once it gives the clear and green signal, we inform the client to ensure there will be no security risk when we deploy. This is a major impact, as per the client point of view; it is a very good tool. The client also gains confidence knowing that we are good to go.

The second benefit is time-saving. If we went manually from code review to senior developers, it would take us much time to find vulnerabilities and code review pointers, which CAST Highlight can provide. Another benefit is that quality and trust went up. The insights of this tool use real peer voice with full reviewer context, making it easier for clients to trust, lowering bounce rates and increasing conversions on comparison pages.

Another benefit is consistency across teams. Before, every analyst picked quotes differently. With CAST Highlight, we can use the same intent model plus scoring for everyone, meaning scalability means the same thing in all reports. The faster publishing impact is also reflected in our organization, where alerts help us catch new reviews and auto highlights assigned to the same-day insights. Overall, this tool reduced research time by 80%.

The best features for CAST Highlight include intent-based extraction. This means it does not just match keywords; it understands context. For example, it scales from 50 to 5,000 users and gets tagged under scalability even if the word is not there.

Another feature I found is smart deduplication, which groups similar quotes and picks the strongest and most significant one. It stops insights from showing eight variations of great UI, giving diverse voices instead of repetition. The third benefit of CAST Highlight is reviewer context tagging, which means highlights come with metadata such as job title, company size, industry, and region. Buyers trust quotes more when they see CTO, 2,000 employees. Another benefit is sentiment and strength scoring, which ranks highlights by how specific, emotional, and credible they are. This detail saved us 20 hours per week. The next feature I found is one-click insight formatting, where we are able to get proper results with a single click when scanning for vulnerabilities and license risks.

Regarding day-to-day features of CAST Highlight, there are many that I found using it. When we installed CAST Highlight, it comes with an inbuilt code editor tool. This means we can simply upload all of our project zips to the code editor tool, and from there it will pass to CAST Highlight. Once it passes, it scans many things. The first thing is that it finds the topic filter dashboard, which means it can fetch many things such as customer support, pricing, and security. Another benefit is that it helps us to find proper software composition, meaning how many tools and software we are using in our project. This is also one of the day-to-day use cases. Another feature is that it gives fresh review alerts, pinging us when new reviews come in with strong, castable quotes, so we do not miss new proof points for trending topics.

If I talk about improvements for CAST Highlight, I would suggest three things. The first is better understanding or niche understanding. Right now, the intent matching is strong for general topics such as ease of use, but for niche B2B terms such as HIPAA compliance or multi-tenant architecture, it sometimes misses context. Improving the domain-specific models would make highlights more accurate for these verticals.

The second improvement is more control over the deduplication logic. CAST Highlight's deduplication is great for avoiding spam, but sometimes we want two similar quotes if they are from very different company sizes, such as SMB versus enterprise perspectives on pricing. A slider to adjust deduplication strictness would help.

The third suggestion I would like to give is deeper sentiment and outcome tagging. While it has core sentiment capabilities, it does not tag outcomes automatically. For instance, if a quote mentions saved $50,000 per year, tagging that as cost savings $50,000 would let us build ROI charts instantly instead of reading each quote manually.

Regarding user experience, integrations, and reporting, I think there is room to enhance those aspects. Regarding user experience, I would suggest improving user actions in terms of bulk actions and keyboard shortcuts. Day-to-day analysts review 50-plus suggested quotes, and currently it is mostly clicking to approve one by one. Adding bulk approve or reject options and keyboard shortcuts would significantly reduce the time taken. A small UX change can lead to a big speed boost.

The second point is integrations when pushing to the CMS and Slack alerts. Right now, we export approved highlights manually from CAST Highlight. If CAST Highlight could push directly to our CMS or send Slack alerts for high-strength quotes that hit trending topics, it would close the loop faster, reducing copy-pasting.

The third improvement relates to reporting, specifically custom insight dashboards. The tool displays which topics have the most highlights, but we cannot build custom dashboards yet. For example, showing all security quotes from healthcare companies with more than 1,000 employees over the last 90 days would enable better filtering, and exportable dashboards would streamline quarterly reviews.

I have been working in my current field for four years.

CAST Highlight proves reliable in nature. I find it dependable regarding reliability and stability.

CAST Highlight handles scalability very effectively; its ability to process thousands of reports across multiple categories is impressive. The processing time per new report stays consistent, experiencing no slowdowns even when we had over 200 new reports dropped in a week.

The second point on scalability is about team usability; multiple analysts and project managers can use it simultaneously without conflicts. Role-based access scales well too; we added more users as the team grew, and the approval workflow remained intact.

Customer support for CAST Highlight has been good. I interacted with customer support regarding one of my project results related to vulnerabilities and license risks, and they explained everything clearly, leaving me very satisfied.

When choosing CAST Highlight, we did some research and development to find alternative tools, but we selected CAST Highlight because it served our manual analysis needs in-house. We were attempting to have analysts pick quotes manually in spreadsheets; it worked well initially but was slow, inconsistent, and hard to scale. The three-hour research time felt random depending on who was doing it.

Additionally, multiple generic AI tools we tested could not grasp reviewer context; they could pull quotes but could not identify if the source was an executive at a large company. Context is crucial for B2B buyers. Our decision was also influenced by positive reviews of CAST Highlight, highlighting that the reviewer context features for roles, company size, and industry required no extra work or tool switching.

CAST Highlight helps with time saved, adoption speed, and there is no extra integration cost.

In terms of time saved, it went from approximately 3.5 hours per insight report to around 40 minutes, which is 80% faster. The team now ships two times more reports per quarter without adding hours. We did not have to hire additional analysts to scale output; the same two-to-three person team now handles what would have required one extra FTE before. Money saved is equal to approximately one FTE worth of manual research time per quarter.

I currently do not use any alternatives apart from CAST Highlight; I think it is the best for my needs.

Governance and security is a big aspect of CAST Highlight, especially for B2B tools.

The first point that stands out is data handling plus PII. It only processes verified data that we already have rights to and does not suggest or ingest our private customer data or documents, so the risk of data leakage is low. Moreover, reviewer information shown includes the company size and industry, with no personal names or emails exposed in the insights unless the reviewer opted in publicly.

The second benefit is access controls; our team could set role-based access while using it; analysts can highlight and approve quotes, but only leads can publish to live insights, keeping QA control with us. No random edits go live.

The third benefit is audit and compliance; every approved quote has a trail indicating who approved it, which conflict it came from, and the timestamp. Therefore, if a legal or buyer asks where a specific claim originated from, we can prove it. For compliance, we surface peer statements with source links instead of making claims. Governance feels solid, as it works only on verified data, has role-based access, and provides full audit trails back to source reviews, keeping us compliant and defensible with buyers.

Overall, the accuracy of CAST Highlight has been strong and reliability is consistent for our use case. The first point is intent matching, which catches the right theme approximately 85 to 90% of the time. For example, if a review says that setup took two weeks, it tags ease of implementation correctly, not just the time. The second thing is strength scoring; high-strength quotes usually read better to buyers, being less vague and providing more specific outcomes. While we still conduct human QA, false positives are low. The third point on accuracy is reviewer context; role, company size, and industry tagging are accurate because it pulls from verified profiles, adding credibility to quotes instead of simply showing generic testimonials.

Regarding reliability, consistency in output is vital; the same items receive the same highlight and score every time without random drift, earning our team's trust for bulk work. We have not experienced missed alerts or failure to process new reports. If a new conflict emerges today, highlights will show up on the same day. We do see less reliability for very niche technical jargon, for example, multi-tenant RBAC might get tagged as access control broadly. Also, sentiment can miss sarcasm during easy setups after three months.

Some advice for others looking into using CAST Highlight is that it is better in terms of cost compared to other available tools. It is also reliable and helps keep humans in the loop, providing accuracy around 85-90% for intent. Quick QA testing requires five minutes of human intervention before publishing. Additionally, training your team to filter and segment by role-based context is critical.

Regarding final thoughts on CAST Highlight, I find it to be a solid tool with some suggestions for improvement. The deduplication strictness is an area we can enhance, and the governance and security are very good. The accuracy of CAST Highlight is also commendable. In terms of pricing, I find it low, and the ROI is high, making it a very scalable tool. I would rate this review an 8 out of 10.

For CAST, I use it in cloud migration roadmap and in open source safety issues. These are my two main use cases.

In cloud migration, I use CAST highlight to identify blockers, which are the negative road patterns, and also the boosters, which are positive code patterns.

The solution provides agnostic blockers for platforms as well as for containerization. Within that containerization, it offers generic blockers. However, my project might require it to provide Windows-specific blockers or Linux-specific blockers, as I often work with only one platform at a time. If I received categorization in containerization blockers, it would save time. Understanding only the OS-specific blockers means I would avoid resolving irrelevant issues, thus saving time.

Initially, I receive a response from support, however, if there is involvement from R&D or other teams, it may take longer than expected. The support team is challenging when sharing source code. As this is a static code analysis tool, it sometimes requires source code for R&D. However, CAST clients may be restricted from sharing due to business logic and nondisclosure agreements. This creates a challenge, and I may have to share pseudo code or seek client approval, risking escalation.

I have used the solution for almost six years.

CAST highlight support is available. I reach out to the CAST vendor for assistance and raise a ticket, which gets assigned to the concerned POC. They could improve, as their main aim seems to be closing the ticket rather than satisfying customer requirements. Some support team members are helpful, and others lack in-depth knowledge of the tool, which might cause challenges.

Negative

My overall product rating is six out of ten.

I have used CAST Highlight in combination with application portfolio management, application lifecycle management, going cloud-ready, and other applications. My main occupation involves software completion analysis and working with various solutions like firewalls and storage.

One of the advantages of using CAST Highlight is that it provides a clear overview of the entire portfolio. It allows me to see the overall quality of my environment and determine where improvements are needed. It also aids in the early detection of trends and can be useful in managing applications within the organization.

CAST Highlight offers a clear overview of the role portfolio and facilitates quick scanning, helping to determine the overall quality of the environment.

There could be potential improvements or additional features added to CAST Highlight to make it better.

I have used CAST Highlight for five years.

The solution has been stable while I was using it, with no significant issues related to stability.

The customer service and local support from CAST are quite good. They offer valuable assistance within the tool.

Positive

The initial setup of CAST Highlight is simple. You need to subscribe, and then the setup involves configuring the application.

I have not specifically mentioned return on investment, but there is some time advantage involved.

The pricing of CAST Highlight was not considered expensive or cheap, and no specific comment was made about the setup cost.

I've used some other tools with a similar set of capabilities as CAST Highlight, covering around fifty to seventy percent of the same functions.

We use the solution in the context of an M&A - mergers and acquisitions. We use it to evaluate what the targets, modernity, or the state of a target code base looks like, to get insights into whether there's any security, legal, or IP risk present.

The way we collect insights has been fairly automated and optimized now that we use CAST Highlight.

If you talk about SonarQube or Black Duck or so many other tools that offer similar functionality as CAST Highlight does, what makes CAST Highlight stand out and makes it more applicable for our use case is the fact that we don't need access to the code base. We can do it remotely. We just need access to the results so that IP doesn't leave the target premise at any time. That's sort of what differentiates CAST for us.

The initial setup is easy.

It offers good performance. 

We get some code insights from CAST. We get insights as to if this or that function has way too many comments or things like that. We would like to backtrace, and understand how dependent that is as per the application. For example, when you are writing code in C Sharp versus writing code in C++, obviously, C++ has more complexities within that. What CAST does is CAST aggregates for different languages, and if they could provide us inputs for each of these languages separately, then that'd be great.

When they classify code between their own code and third-party code, they classify it based on the number of files, and not really the number of lines. I'm not sure how extensive of a change this is on their end; however, it would be nice if they could tell us the number of lines of code that are not theirs.

There's a bit of a learning curve at the outset.

We have come across bugs occasionally.

Technical support could be better.

I've been using the solution for one year now. 

We haven't had any performance issues so far. We have come across a few bugs here and there. 

We have not done any scaling ourselves. We have not tried pushing it to the limit. With that being said, we do have some sort of odd cases where we have a ten-million language code, and there we have no problem.

Pretty much for every engagement, we plan to use it, so we have no plans to either decrease or increase the usage at this time.

The solution does come with technical support. I've reached out to them to discuss bugs, which maybe need to be better under control. I found it hard to explain the bugs I was experiencing to support. While they were keen to assist, even after providing everything on my end, they were unable to understand the issue itself. In the end, we decided to change the solution in our own way and not really rely on them.

Neutral

We did previously use open-source solutions. 

Our team has been working with CAST for a few years now, so it is now pretty simple. That said, it took a sort of learning curve to define real working knowledge. However, now that we have it, we're fine.

We handled the implementation ourselves. 

We've been using it for two years and found that it is really profitable to have the product in our arsenal. 

While my understanding is we pay per the number of scans, I can't speak to the exact pricing. We get a certain number of scans per year and then pay a fee for it. 

The price of the scan does not differ in terms of the size of the query.

There are no hidden costs.

I'm not sure if we evaluated other options.

We are end-users.

I'm not too sure which version of the solution we're using. I'm pretty certain that we are using the latest version.

We do get an agent that we send to the targets. They install it locally within the system. The agent is run locally, and the agent gives some CSV outputs, and those outputs are uploaded to the SaaS portal. From there, we get the insights.

They have their own training academy, where you could learn how to use CAST Highlight. I would really recommend to new users that they go through the training academy to understand the product. CAST has a certain way of working, which might not be the most obvious if you look at it from the outside. There is a little learning curve that people should be aware of.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We are using CAST Highlight for the location because it's an indicator for us that can differentiate us from the other health insurance company. We are using the indicator as proof of the quality of service for our application. 

The most valuable features of the CAST Highlight are the interface and there are three notations that are very simple to understand and communicate with.

CAST Highlight could improve to allow us to comment and do a deep analysis by ourselves.

I have been using CAST Highlight for approximately three years.

CAST Highlight is stable. We only had a problem last year because we discovered that our data at the beginning was outside Europe and were in the United States. We asked to transfer our data to Europe and it was very complicated to do it and we lost some data in the transfer. However, it has now stabilized.

We have approximately 10 people using this solution in my organization. CAST Highlight notations exist and when we need the notation to make a presentation or to explain the way we work, we use these notations. Everyone in the company has access.

We would like to increase the usage of the solution.

The support from CAST Highlight is very good.

The initial installation of CAST Highlight was not easy because we have different sources, and the line of the sources was in different places, we had to gather everything. However, if we did it now the process would be fine.

The duration of the first deployment of 200 applications took some time but if we did it now it would be faster and it would be easier.

We were helped directly with the implementation by the CAST Highlight team and we have done the process by ourselves with the expert from CAST Highlight.

CAST Highlight is an expensive solution. However, CAST Highlight is less expensive than the CAST AIP, but it remains too expensive and the professional services from CAST are also too expensive. The high price is part of the problem with the CAST solutions.

Before using CAST Highlight I would recommend others to have a clear view, and overview of the quality of code on which they can communicate with other industries or with customers.

I rate CAST Highlight a seven out of ten.

CAST Highlight is used to measure the decline of software and automatic function point measurement.

The most valuable features of CAST Highlight are automation and speed.

The ease of configuration and customization could be improved in CAST Highlight.

I have been using CAST Highlight for one year.

CAST Highlight is a highly stable solution.

CAST Highlight has high scalability. Most of our clients for CAST Highlight are enterprise businesses.

The solution’s initial setup is complex.

The solution’s deployment could take a couple of weeks.

We have seen a return on investment with CAST Highlight.

CAST Highlight is an expensive solution.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing an eight or nine out of ten.

I am working with the latest version of CAST Highlight.

Overall, I rate CAST Highlight an eight out of ten.

We are a solution provider and we used CAST Highlight in a project, last year, for one of our clients. 

CAST Highlight is easy to use and has a good dashboard.

This solution integrates well with Azure DevOps and you can import the dashboard into that environment.

The level of abstraction is a little bit high compared to other solutions, such as Veracode.

The reports that describe the issues of concern are rather abstract and the issues should be more clearly described to the user. Reducing this type of technical debt would help to manage policy such that it was easier to create and submit for approval. Essentially, it does not provide enough help for the developers.

We used CAST Highlight for about one year.

The software is stable. It was used on a daily basis during this project. There were often seven builds competed each day that reports were generated for.

I have not seen any issues related to scalability, although we were not using a great deal of code. It was quite possibly only three or four repositories that we were scanning, which means that we did not really test the scalability.

We only had six or seven people in our DevOps team for this project.

We did not have to contact technical support.

I have also used Veracode and I like it much better. Veracode is easier for developers to work with. I have also worked with SonarQube.

The integration with Azure DevOps means that there are things you can do in CAST Highlight that you cannot do using other solutions.

It is easy to set up and get started.

Our in-house team handled the deployment. It took a couple of days to deploy and learn how to use it.

Basic support is included with the standard licensing fee but it can be upgraded for an additional cost.

In general, this solution is easy to set up, easy to get started, easy to use, and easy to integrate, but the usability is not as high as that of Veracode. It would be great if it were more developer-friendly and it provided more information on how to resolve the problems that it discovers. I have seen other tools that do a better job of providing reports and guidance to the developers.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

We are using it for a customer to help review the architecture of the different applications and understand how to replatform them.

We use it for our customers. Too early to say how customer has benefited.

The way it tells you which codebase is more ready for the cloud and which codebase is less ready is very valuable. It works seamlessly with most languages.

Its price should be better. It is a pretty costly tool.

They have two products: CAST Highlight and CAST AIP. Both are licensed separately. As per CAST, Highlight is for RAPID prototyping and AIP is for in depth detailed analysis. But then there are areas which Highlights covers (Cloud Adoption) which AIP does not. Our experience in using AIP is that it also does not look at entire tech stack and does not provide the list of all technologies present in your application and then flag what is supported and what is not so that customer has clear view. Highlight probably does that. They need to simplify it for customers. I would expect CAST Highlight to have lighter version of the Health dashboard and the Engineering dashboards . These dashboards are currently a part of CAST AIP, and if these are made available in CAST Highlight, customers won't have to use two different products all the time.

I have been using this solution for one and a half to two months.

It is stable. It works seamlessly with most languages. However, when the application code is pretty complex, such as .NET with entity framework, it probably does not check the integrity of the application.

It is pretty good in terms of scalability.

Their technical team is pretty helpful. They provide excellent support.

Positive

NA

CAST Highlight is easy to install. Other products of CAST, such as CAST AIP, can be a little complex.

We have leveraged CAST SMEs and they provide excellent support and have great indepth knowledge of the product

Too early to say as we have just started.

It is a pretty costly tool. A lot of customers are resistant to using it.

We evaluated a lot of tools, but for this particular use case, we couldn't find any tool that matches CAST Highlight.

I would advise others to really do their homework and understand the use case and how CAST Highlight is going to help them. Otherwise, they will only be spending money, and they may not really see its value. 

It is a pretty strong engineering tool, but unless you are really clear about the use case and the outcomes, you will not get a value out of it. If you do not know the outcomes and what do you want to do with the tool, you will get the dashboards or output, but you won't be able to consume and benefit from it. For example, a fantastic use case is when you know for sure that a customer is looking to migrate ten applications from on-prem to cloud and wants to know how much code is ready for moving to the cloud versus how much refactoring they need to do. If you're looking for a code change estimate from on-prem to on-prem or some other application, CAST Highlight may not be a good tool for such a use case.

I would rate CAST Highlight an eight out of ten.