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 8.3, while Contrast Security is ranked #26 with an average rating of 8.0. Checkmarx holds a 10.0% 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 71 Checkmarx One reviews

20,870 Views
17,740 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Contrast Security Assess

Read 11 Contrast Security Assess reviews

1,243 Views
709 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: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Checkmarx One vs. Contrast Security Assess

July 2025

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Helped 865,295 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 (23rd), Container Security (22nd), Static Code Analysis (3rd), API Security (4th), Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) (4th), DevSecOps (4th), Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (9th)

Contrast Security Assess

Ranking in Application Security Tools

27th

Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

26th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Static Application Security Testing (SAST) category, the mindshare of Checkmarx One is 10.0%, down from 12.5% 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

Syed Hasan

Specialist Leader at Deloitte

Partner experiences excellent technical support and seamless initial setup

In my opinion, if we are able to extract or show the report, and because everything is going towards agent tech and GenAI, it would be beneficial if it could get integrated with our code base and do the fix automatically. It could suggest how the code base is written and automatically populate the source code with three different solution options to choose from. This would be really helpful.

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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.

Read full review

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 of Checkmarx are difficult to pinpoint because of the way the functionalities and the features are intertwined, it's difficult to say which part of them I prefer most. You initiate the scan, you have a scan, you have the review set, and reporting, they all work together as one whole process. It's not like accounting software, where you have the different features, et cetera."

"Vulnerability details is valuable."

"Most valuable features include: ease of use, dashboard. interface and the ability to report."

"The solution communicates where to fix the issue for the purpose of less iterations."

"It allows for SAST scanning of uncompiled code. Further, it natively integrates with all key repos formats (Git, TFS, SVN, Perforce, etc)."

"The only thing I like is that Checkmarx does not need to compile."

"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 identification of verification-related security vulnerabilities is really important and one of the key things. It also identifies vulnerabilities for any kind of third-party tool coming into the system or any third-party tools that you are using, which is very useful for avoiding random hacking."

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."

"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."

"When we access the application, it continuously monitors and detects vulnerabilities."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Contrast Security Assess pros

Cons

"The interactive application security testing, or IAST, the interactive part where you're looking at an application that lives in a runtime environment on a server or virtual machine, needs improvement."

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

"I would like the product to include more debugging and developed tools. It needs to also add enhancements on the coding side."

"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."

"I expect application security vendors to cover all aspects of application security, including SAST, DAST, and even mobile application security testing. And it would be much better if they provided an on-premises and cloud option for all these main application security features."

"Integration into the SDLC (i.e. support for last version of SonarQube) could be added."

"The pricing can get a bit expensive, depending on the company's size."

"It provides us with quite a handful of false positive issues. If Checkmarx could reduce this number, it would be a great tool to use."

More Checkmarx One cons

"Regarding the solution's OSS feature, the one drawback that we do have is that it does not have client-side support. We'll be missing identification of libraries like jQuery or JavaScript, and such, that are client-side."

"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."

"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."

"The solution needs to improve flexibility...The scalability of the product is a problem in the solution, especially from a commercial perspective."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Contrast Security Assess cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's relatively expensive."

"It is an expensive solution."

"The pricing is competitive and provides a lower TCO (total cost of ownership) for achieving application security."

"Checkmarx is not a cheap scanning tool, but none of the security tools are cheap. Checkmarx is a powerful scanning tool, and it’s essential to have one of these products."

"The solution's price is high and you pay based on the number of users."

"It is the right price for quality delivery."

"We got a special offer for a 30% reduction for three years, after our first year. I think for a real source-code scanning tool, you have to add a lot of money for Open Source Analysis, and AppSec Coach (160 Euro per user per year)."

"The number of users and coverage for languages will have an impact on the cost of the license."

More Checkmarx One pricing and cost advice

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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

20%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

22%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Computer Software Company

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 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

What advice do you have for others considering Contrast Security Assess?

Contrast Security Assess is deployed on-cloud in our organization. I would recommend Contrast Security Assess to other users. It's a really good tool. It provides lots of details on web-based vulne...

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Comparisons

SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) vs Checkmarx One

Compared 40% of the time

Veracode vs Checkmarx One

Compared 9% of the time

Checkmarx SAST vs Checkmarx One

Compared 7% of the time

OpenText Core Application Security vs Checkmarx One

Compared 5% of the time

OWASP Zap vs Checkmarx One

Compared 5% of the time

More Checkmarx One Competitors

OpenText Dynamic Application Security Testing vs Contrast Security Assess

Compared 13% of the time

Seeker vs Contrast Security Assess

Compared 11% of the time

Veracode vs Contrast Security Assess

Compared 9% of the time

Invicti vs Contrast Security Assess

Compared 7% of the time

Coverity vs Contrast Security Assess

Compared 4% of the time

More Contrast Security Assess Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Checkmarx One

August 2025

Download Checkmarx One product report

Buyer's Guide

Contrast Security Assess

August 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

July 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: July 2025.

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