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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
31st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (26th)
GitHub Advanced Security
Ranking in Application Security Tools
11th
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 June 2026, in the Application Security Tools category, the mindshare of Contrast Security Assess is 1.6%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of GitHub Advanced Security is 2.6%, down from 8.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Security Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
GitHub Advanced Security2.6%
Contrast Security Assess1.6%
Other95.8%
Application Security Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Eucharia Okafor - PeerSpot reviewer
DevSecOps 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

"Overall, the product is strong and improving, support is responsive and effective, and supported integrations work for many customers."
"When we access the application, it continuously monitors and detects vulnerabilities."
"One of the key takeaways is that in order to have a secure application, you cannot rely on just the pentest, vulnerability assessments, and the periodicity of the reviews; you need the real-time feedback on that, and Contrast Assess offers that."
"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 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."
"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."
"From a percentage perspective, somewhere around 90 percent of the time we used to spend has been given back to our team, because the false positive rate with Contrast is less than 5 percent."
"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."
"The most valuable is the developer experience and the extensibility of the overall ecosystem."
"GitHub Advanced Security is a very developer-friendly solution that is integrated within my development environment."
"Dependency scanning is a valuable feature."
"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 is a stable solution...It is a scalable solution as it can handle new applications along with the analysis part."
"GitHub Advanced Security is ten out of ten scalable."
"The initial setup was straightforward and completed in a matter of minutes."
"It ensures user passwords or sensitive information are not accidentally exposed in code or reports."
 

Cons

"I would like to see them come up with more scanning rules."
"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 needs to improve flexibility...The scalability of the product is a problem in the solution, especially from a commercial perspective."
"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."
"The out-of-the-box reporting could be improved. We need to write our own APIs to make the reporting more robust."
"The solution should provide more details in the section where it shows that third-party libraries have CVEs or some vulnerabilities."
"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."
"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."
"For GitHub Advanced Security, I would like to see more support for various programming languages."
"The report limitations are the main issue."
"There could be DST features included in the product."
"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."
"An area of GitHub Advanced Security that has room for improvement is customization."
"GitHub Advanced Security should look into API security issues, which they currently do not. Additionally, open-source security vulnerabilities are not getting updated in a timely manner."
"A more refined approach, categorizing and emphasizing specific vulnerabilities, would be beneficial."
"The customizations are a little bit difficult."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's pricing is low. I would rate it a two out of ten."
"The solution is expensive."
"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 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."
"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
16%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Construction Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise7
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.