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Contrast Security Assess vs GitHub Advanced Security 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

Contrast Security Assess
Ranking in Application Security Tools
25th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (21st)
GitHub Advanced Security
Ranking in Application Security Tools
12th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Application Security Tools category, the mindshare of Contrast Security Assess is 1.7%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of GitHub Advanced Security is 2.5%, down from 8.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Security Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
GitHub Advanced Security2.5%
Contrast Security Assess1.7%
Other95.8%
Application Security Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Eucharia Okafor - PeerSpot reviewer
Dev Ops Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Continuous in-app security has transformed our development workflow and has reduced manual checks
Contrast Security Assess changes how the team thinks about security. Instead of us waiting for a security audit at the end of any sprint, vulnerabilities surface as developers are writing and testing code. That shift is significant because fixing a bug in development costs more than fixing it later. It captures everything right there and remediates it because it catches vulnerability and remediates immediately while the application is running. It improves our collaboration between development and security teams, as developers get clear actionable findings immediately. We get continuous visibility into our application risk posture. Ultimately, it helps us to shift fast and save money, which is usually a trade-off, but Contrast Security Assess makes both possible. The feature that stands out most to me in Contrast Security Assess is the ability to capture vulnerability while the application is running. Another standout feature is the real-time detection that finds vulnerabilities as code runs. It has fewer false positives and works continuously in the application; you install it and it is there. It captures issues during development quickly and is easily integrated with a CI/CD pipeline, especially if you are using GitLab or GitHub. The real-time detection feature of Contrast Security Assess helps us very well compared to traditional SAST tools. Traditional tools scan from the outside and guess where problems might be. Contrast Security Assess works from the inside because it is embedded into the application. The agent lives inside the running application, allowing it to see exactly what is happening in real-time. This means we are getting accurate alerts instead of a long list of potential issues that require manual investigation. When it comes to the CI/CD pipeline, Contrast Security Assess really shines for our daily work, as it plugs directly into tools like Jenkins, GitHub, or Azure DevOps. When a developer commits code and triggers a build, Contrast Security Assess is already testing it in the background. If there is any vulnerability, the pipeline automatically flags or stops the application before bad code reaches production. This means security becomes everyone's responsibility, not just the security team's, and it gives us real-time, accurate security that fits into how our team already works.
Devendiran Kandan - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Security scanning has protected our pipelines but currently needs clearer dashboards and controls
We used additional third-party solutions, but we replaced them with GitHub Advanced Security, even though I do not have a very good opinion about GitHub Advanced Security. Even though it is an inline product, I'm not seeing user-friendly things in GitHub Advanced Security. Dependent bots and the secret detection are good compared to others. However, code scanning is not finding very good results based on pipeline where it will scan and do code scanning. While build, before building and deploying the code, we want to block or do an advanced model, but it is not supporting. During deployment, code scanning is not good. It is a little complicated. It is not a straightforward method we can complete. We need expertise to get the full benefit, and troubleshooting sometimes requires going through that. The security overview dashboard is not really clear. It's not showing centralized information; each repo is showing, but if you compare it with competitors, it is not that great. Mainly in the centralized dashboard, enterprise level needs to improve. A centralized way where we can get that overall view is needed, and we want that code scanning and blocking deployments based on security. There are AI improvements, but however, it is not so easy to configure. It is multiple windows we need to go through and make changes or configure that. A few things we need to enable going into settings, and a few things we can find out in security. One product where security means the security dashboard should cover everything, but it is going here and there in many places.

Quotes from Members

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

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."
"Overall, the product is strong and improving, support is responsive and effective, and supported integrations work for many customers."
"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."
"Contrast was a very complete solution; it met all of our technical requirements and it was really the only IAST product that felt like a real product."
"Assess has brought our development time down because it helps create code the first time."
"Security feedback comes to developers instantly with Contrast Security Assess, reducing costs by about 50%."
"You cannot get much better than Contrast Security Assess for large deployments of applications and also critical applications."
"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."
"It is a stable solution...It is a scalable solution as it can handle new applications along with the analysis part."
"GitHub provides advanced security, which is why the customers choose this tool; it allows them to rely solely on GitHub as one platform for everything they need."
"GitHub Advanced Security uses artificial intelligence in the backend, specifically CodeQL, to analyze code and provide fewer but more reliable findings, so there are less false positives."
"It ensures user passwords or sensitive information are not accidentally exposed in code or reports."
"Dependency scanning is a valuable feature."
"GitHub Advanced Security is a very developer-friendly solution that is integrated within my development environment."
"The initial setup was straightforward and completed in a matter of minutes."
"GitHub Advanced Security is ten out of ten scalable."
 

Cons

"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."
"The solution needs to improve flexibility...The scalability of the product is a problem in the solution, especially from a commercial perspective."
"I do find that here and there with Contrast Security Assess there are user interface issues, particularly with how they work with libraries."
"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."
"I think Contrast can also integrate with some AI tools and provide chat features if possible, so in case we have any more questions, we can chat with that chatbot and get remediations, which I believe would be a better enhancement to Contrast."
"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."
"Regarding Contrast Security Assess's AI capabilities, I think they are missing a huge opportunity because they could lead the way in automatic testing and AI security testing, but currently, they do not offer this functionality, which is a shame."
"Their level of support and troubleshooting for the product is limited because of how they handle troubleshooting. It's done through a log file that's very cumbersome to work with."
"We used additional third-party solutions, but we replaced them with GitHub Advanced Security, even though I do not have a very good opinion about GitHub Advanced Security."
"There could be DST features included in the product."
"For GitHub Advanced Security, I would like to see more support for various programming languages."
"The deployment part of the product is an area of concern that needs to be made easier from an improvement perspective."
"The customizations are a little bit difficult."
"There could be a centralized dashboard to view reports of all the projects on one platform."
"Maybe make it compatible with more programming languages. Have a customized ruleset where the end-user can create their own rules for scanning."
"The report limitations are the main issue."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's pricing is low. I would rate it a two out of ten."
"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."
"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."
"The solution is expensive."
"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."
"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 solution is expensive."
"The current licensing model, which relies on active commitments, poses challenges, particularly in predicting and managing growth."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Construction Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise10
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise7
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Contrast Security Assess?
Regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing, the annual licensing for Contrast Security Assess costs about $20,000 to $100,000 per year, and per application, it costs about $5,000 to $15,000 per y...
What needs improvement with Contrast Security Assess?
Contrast Security Assess could improve in the reporting and the dashboard experience. While the data is there, pulling together an executive-level summary requires too much manual work. I would lov...
What advice do you have for others considering Contrast Security Assess?
The biggest production gain from Contrast Security Assess is the reduced costs and overhead within my company. Security feedback comes to developers instantly with Contrast Security Assess, reducin...
What needs improvement with GitHub Advanced Security?
We used additional third-party solutions, but we replaced them with GitHub Advanced Security, even though I do not have a very good opinion about GitHub Advanced Security. Even though it is an inli...
What is your primary use case for GitHub Advanced Security?
I'm working with software development nowadays. As a process, we are using the dependent bot alerts and the code scanning for Java, and some of the code scanning is happening. Security secrets in c...
What advice do you have for others considering GitHub Advanced Security?
Dependent bots and the secret detection are good compared to others. However, code scanning is not finding very good results based on pipeline where it will scan and do code scanning. While build, ...
 

Also Known As

Contrast Assess
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Williams-Sonoma, Autodesk, HUAWEI, Chromeriver, RingCentral, Demandware.
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Contrast Security Assess vs. GitHub Advanced Security and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.