Checkmarx One vs Contrast Security Assess comparison

Checkmarx and Contrast Security are both solutions in the Static Application Security Testing (SAST) category. Checkmarx is ranked #3 with an average rating of 7.8, while Contrast Security is ranked #22 with an average rating of 8.7. Checkmarx holds a 10.6% mindshare in SAST, compared to Contrast Security’s 0.5% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of Checkmarx users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Contrast Security users who would recommend it.

Checkmarx One

Read 70 Checkmarx One reviews

20,789 Views
14,037 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Contrast Security Assess

Read 11 Contrast Security Assess reviews

766 Views
488 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Checkmarx One

Contrast Security Assess

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 8, 2024

Checkmarx One and Contrast Security Assess are prominent application security tools. Contrast Security Assess appears to have the upper hand in feature richness and real-time security insights, while Checkmarx One is more competitive in pricing and customer support.

Features: Checkmarx One users note its comprehensive scanning coverage, effective CI/CD pipeline integration, and support for a variety of development languages. Contrast Security Assess is recognized for its real-time monitoring, ease of integration with existing workflows, and ability to deliver in-depth security analysis.

Room for Improvement: Checkmarx One users suggest enhancements in scan speed, reducing false positives, and improving user interface navigation. For Contrast Security Assess, there is feedback to improve documentation comprehensiveness, boost new user assistance, and refine dashboard functionalities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Checkmarx One is commended for a seamless deployment process and responsive customer service, facilitating straightforward integration. Contrast Security Assess offers a simple deployment but relies more heavily on community support, indicating a need for better onboarding experiences.

Pricing and ROI: Checkmarx One provides favorable pricing and supportive service contracts, appealing to budget-conscious organizations with good ROI. Contrast Security Assess is generally more expensive, but users feel its extensive feature set offers long-term value through advanced security insights.

To learn more, read our detailed Checkmarx One vs. Contrast Security Assess Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Checkmarx One vs. Contrast Security Assess

April 2025

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Helped 845,960 peers since 2012

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

Checkmarx One

Ranking in Application Security Tools

3rd

Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

3rd

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Vulnerability Management (21st), Static Code Analysis (2nd), API Security (3rd), DevSecOps (2nd), Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (8th)

Contrast Security Assess

Ranking in Application Security Tools

26th

Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

22nd

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Static Application Security Testing (SAST) category, the mindshare of Checkmarx One is 10.6%, down from 14.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Contrast Security Assess is 0.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

Featured Reviews

Rohit Kesharwani

Manager, Engineering at 7-Eleven.

Provides good security analysis and security identification within the source code

We integrate Checkmarx into our software development cycle using GitLab's CI/CD pipeline. Checkmark has been the most helpful for us in the development stage. The solution's incremental scanning feature has impacted our development speed. The solution's vulnerability detection is around 80% to 90% accurate. I would recommend Checkmarx to other users because it is one of the good tools for doing security analysis and security identification within the source code. Overall, I rate Checkmarx a nine out of ten.

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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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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 features are the easy to understand interface, and it 's very user-friendly."

"The solution is always updating to continuously add items that create a level of safety from vulnerabilities. It's one of the key features they provide that's an excellent selling point. They're always ahead of the game when it comes to finding any vulnerabilities within the database."

"Less false positive errors as compared to any other solution."

"The features and technologies are very good. The flexibility and the roadmap have also been very good. They're at the forefront of delivering the additional capabilities that are required with cloud delivery, etc. Their ability to deliver what customers require and when they require is very important."

"The most valuable features of Checkmarx are the Best Fix Location and the Payments option because you can save a lot of time trying to mitigate the configuration. Using these tools can save you a lot of time."

"Vulnerability details is valuable."

"The setup is very easy. There is a lot of information in the documents which makes the install not difficult at all."

"Both automatic and manual code review (CxQL) are valuable."

More Checkmarx One pros

"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."

"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."

"Assess has an excellent API interface to pull APIs."

"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."

"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."

"I am impressed with the product's identification of alerts and vulnerabilities."

"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."

"By far, the thing that was able to provide value was the immediate response while testing ahead of release, in real-time."

More Contrast Security Assess pros

Cons

"C, C++, VB and T-SQL are not supported by this product. Although, C and C++ were advertised as being supported."

"The plugins for the development environment have room for improvements such as for Android Studio and X code."

"As the solution becomes more complex and feature rich, it takes more time to debug and resolve problems. Feature-wise, we have no complaints, but Checkmarx becomes harder to maintain as the product becomes more complex. When I talk to support, it takes them longer to fix the problem than it used to."

"Checkmarx has a slightly difficult compilation with the CI/CD pipeline."

"We are trying to find out if there is a way to identify the run-time null values. I am analyzing different tools to check if there is any tool that supports run-time null value identification, but I don't think any of the tools in the market currently supports this feature. It would be helpful if Checkmarx can identify and throw an exception for a null value at the run time. It would make things a lot easier if there is a way for Checkmarx to identify nullable fields or hard-coded values in the code. The accessibility for customized Checkmarx rules is currently limited and should be improved. In addition, it would be great if Checkmarx can do static code and dynamic code validation. It does a lot of security-related scanning, and it should also do static code and dynamic code validation. Currently, for security-related validation, we are using Checkmarx, and for static code and dynamic code validation, we are using some other tools. We are spending money on different tools. We can pay a little extra money and use Checkmarx for everything."

"The tool is currently quite static in terms of finding security vulnerabilities. It would be great if it was more dynamic and we had even more tools at our disposal to keep us safe. It would help if there was more scanning or if the process was more automated."

"Checkmarx being Windows only is a hindrance. Another problem is: why can't I choose PostgreSQL?"

"The cost per user is high and should be reduced."

More Checkmarx One cons

"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."

"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."

"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."

"To instrument an agent, it has to be running on a type of application technology that the agent recognizes and understands. It's excellent when it works. If we're using an application that is using an unsupported technology, then we can't instrument it at all. We do use PHP and Contrast presently doesn't support that, although it's on their roadmap. My primary hurdle is that it doesn't support all of the technologies that we use."

"The solution should provide more details in the section where it shows that third-party libraries have CVEs or some vulnerabilities."

"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."

More Contrast Security Assess cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is the right price for quality delivery."

"The tool's pricing is fine."

"The license has a vague language around P1 issues and the associated support. Make sure to review these in order to align them with your organizational policies."

"Before implementing the product I would evaluate if it is really necessary to scan so many different languages and frameworks. If not, I think there must be a cheaper solution for scanning Java-only applications (which are 90% of our applications)."

"This solution is expensive. The customized package allows you to buy additional users at any time."

"I would rate the solution’s pricing an eight out of ten. The tool’s pricing is higher than others and it is for the license alone."

"Its price is fair. It is in or around the right spot. Ultimately, if the price is wrong, customers won't commit, but they do tend to commit. It is neither too cheap nor too expensive."

"We have purchased an annual license to use this solution. The price is reasonable."

More Checkmarx One 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."

"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."

"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 solution is expensive."

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

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

22%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Computer Software Company

12%

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What alternatives are there for Fortify WebInspect and Fortify SCA?

I would like to recommend Checkmarx. With Checkmarx, you are able to have an all in one solution for SAST and SCA as well. Veracode is only a cloud solution. Hope this helps.

See all answers

What do you like most about Checkmarx?

Compared to the solutions we used previously, Checkmarx has reduced our workload by almost 75%.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Checkmarx?

The pricing is relatively expensive due to the product's quality and performance, but it is worth it.

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

Comparisons

SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) vs Checkmarx One

Compared 42% of the time

Veracode vs Checkmarx One

Compared 12% of the time

Fortify on Demand vs Checkmarx One

Compared 6% of the time

Checkmarx SAST vs Checkmarx One

Compared 5% of the time

OWASP Zap vs Checkmarx One

Compared 4% of the time

More Checkmarx One Competitors

Seeker vs Contrast Security Assess

Compared 18% of the time

Veracode vs Contrast Security Assess

Compared 12% of the time

SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) vs Contrast Security Assess

Compared 9% of the time

OWASP Zap vs Contrast Security Assess

Compared 9% of the time

GitHub Advanced Security vs Contrast Security Assess

Compared 5% of the time

More Contrast Security Assess Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Checkmarx One

April 2025

Download Checkmarx One product report

Buyer's Guide

Contrast Security Assess

April 2025

Download Contrast Security Assess product report

Also Known As

No data available

Contrast Assess

Overview

Checkmarx One is an enterprise cloud-native application security platform focused on providing cross-tool, correlated results to help AppSec and developer teams prioritize where to focus time and resources.

Checkmarx One offers comprehensive application scanning across the SDLC:

Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
API security
Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST)
Container security
IaC security
Correlation, prioritization, and risk management
Codebashing secure code training
AI security
Tech partnerships extending AppSec into runtime analysis
Developer tool integrations including: CI/CD tools, development frameworks, feedback tools, IDEs, programming languages and SCMs

Checkmarx One provides everything you need to secure application development from the first line of code through deployment and runtime in the cloud. With an ever-evolving set of AppSec engines, correlation and prioritization features, and AI capabilities, Checkmarx One helps consolidate expanding lists of AppSec tools and make better sense of results. Its capabilities are designed to provide an improved developer experience to build trust with development teams and ensure the success of your AppSec program investment.

Checkmarx

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.

Contrast Security

Sample Customers

YIT, Salesforce, Coca-Cola, SAP, U.S. Army, Liveperson, Playtech Case Study: Liveperson Implements Innovative Secure SDLC

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

Buyer's Guide

Checkmarx One vs. Contrast Security Assess

April 2025

Free Report: Checkmarx One vs. Contrast Security Assess

Find out what your peers are saying about Checkmarx One vs. Contrast Security Assess and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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