Contrast Security Assess vs HCL AppScan comparison

Contrast Security and HCLSoftware are both solutions in the Application Security Tools category. Contrast Security is ranked #30, while HCLSoftware is ranked #20 with an average rating of 8.3. Contrast Security holds a 1.1% mindshare in AS, compared to HCLSoftware ’s 2.3% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Contrast Security users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 84% of HCLSoftware users who would recommend it.

Contrast Security Assess

Read 11 Contrast Security Assess reviews

1,722 Views
1,119 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

HCL AppScan

Read 44 HCL AppScan reviews

4,387 Views
3,071 Comparison Views

84% willing to recommend

Contrast Security Assess

HCL AppScan

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 8, 2024

HCL AppScan and Contrast Security Assess compete in the application security testing category. Contrast Security Assess appears to have the upper hand due to its extensive features and real-time analytics that users find considerably beneficial.

Features: HCL AppScan offers a comprehensive set of scanning capabilities, identifying security vulnerabilities across various application layers, and ensuring a secure environment. Contrast Security Assess provides real-time vulnerability detection, intuitive integration into development processes, and ease of use, making it favored for continuous security monitoring.

Room for Improvement: HCL AppScan users highlight areas like reporting functionalities, integration with other tools, and generating actionable insights from scan results. Contrast Security Assess users suggest enhancements in scalability, extended language support, and flexibility to cater to diverse development environments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: HCL AppScan deployment can be complex with longer setup times, though customer support is satisfactory. Contrast Security Assess is straightforward with user-friendly deployment and satisfactory customer service, allowing easy integration into existing systems.

Pricing and ROI: HCL AppScan's pricing is relatively affordable, providing a good return on investment. Contrast Security Assess, despite higher costs, is seen as justified due to long-term benefits and enhanced security outcomes, making it a more strategic investment.

To learn more, read our detailed Contrast Security Assess vs. HCL AppScan Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Contrast Security Assess vs. HCL AppScan

December 2025

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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

30th

Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

28th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

HCL AppScan

Ranking in Application Security Tools

20th

Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

17th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

5.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) (4th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Application Security Tools category, the mindshare of Contrast Security Assess is 1.1%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HCL AppScan is 2.3%, down from 2.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Security Tools Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
HCL AppScan	2.3%
Contrast Security Assess	1.1%
Other	96.6%

Application Security Tools

Featured Reviews

reviewer1605099

Director of Threat and Vulnerability Management at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

We're gathering vulnerability data from multiple environments in real time, fundamentally changing how we identify issues in applications

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. Assess also provides the option of helping developers incorporate security elements while they're writing code. It depends on whether individual developers decide to utilize the information that's provided to them from the solution, but it definitely gives them visibility into more environments. It gives them an opportunity to remediate vulnerabilities well before production deployments.

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Ravi Khanchandani

Founder Director at Techsa Services

Has improved identification of encryption and authentication issues across cloud and on-prem applications

During the learning curve of onboarding HCL AppScan, we learned that HCL has altered the portfolio and now offers HCL AppScan 360, which has a much better look and feel with an improved user interface. However, there is one feature called SCA, which stands for Software Composition Analysis, that could be improved. When I'm doing an application scan, HCL AppScan has the ability to generate information about what components are in use. For example, if I'm scanning a web application, it shows me the various components being used. It tells me whether I have Java libraries, .NET frameworks, or other log management libraries such as Log4j, and what versions of those specific components are present. I would like to see more detailed reports from the tool. Currently, you can find out the components belonging to a specific software, but if detailed reporting became available, you would be in a better position to identify vulnerabilities. For instance, I could identify that I had the Log4j vulnerability and know that I need to fix my application accordingly. If they add the features I'm describing, I would consider giving them a higher rating. However, I've only been experienced with the product for three months.

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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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

More Contrast Security Assess pros

"Compared to other tools only AppScan supports special language."

"Technical support is helpful."

"You can easily find particular features and functions through the UI."

"It comes with all of the templates that we need. For example, we are a company that is regulated by PCI. In order to be PCI compliant, we have a lot of checks and procedures to which we have to comply."

"It's generally a very user-friendly tool. Anyone can easily learn how to scan"

"AppScan's most valuable features include its ability to identify vulnerabilities accurately, provide detailed remediation steps, and the newly introduced AI-powered features that enhance its functionality further."

"The solution is easy to install. I would rate the product's setup between six to seven out of ten. The deployment time depends on the applications that need to be scanned. We have a development and operations team to take care of the product's maintenance."

"Usually when we deploy the application, there is a process for ethical hacking. The main benefit is that, the ethical hacking is almost clean, every time. So it's less cost, less effort, less time to production."

More HCL AppScan pros

Cons

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"I would like to see them come up with more scanning rules."

"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."

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

More Contrast Security Assess cons

"The product has some technical limitations."

"If HCL AppScan is able to alert the clients over email once the scan is complete, it would be great. Right now, HCL AppScan doesn't let me know if the scanning part is finished or not, because of which I have to come back and check mostly."

"In future releases, I would like to see more aggressive reports. I would also like to see less false positives."

"We would like to see a check in the specific vulnerabilities in mobile applications or rooted devices, such as jailbreaking devices."

"We have experienced challenges when trying to integrate this solution with other products. When you compare it with the other SecOps products, the quality of the output is too low. It is not a new-age product. It is very outdated."

"The solution needs to improve in some areas. The tool needs to add more languages. It also needs to improve its speed."

"I would love to see more containers. Many of the tools are great, they require an amount of configuration, setup and infrastructure. If most the applications were in a container, I think everything would be a little bit faster, because all our clients are now using containers."

"HCL AppScan needs to improve security."

More HCL AppScan cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 solution is expensive."

"The price is very expensive."

"The tool was expensive."

"The product has premium pricing and could be more competitive."

"HCL AppScan is expensive."

"AppScan is a little bit expensive. IBM needs to work a little bit on the pricing model, decreasing the license cost."

"The price of HCL AppScan is okay, in my opinion. You just buy HCL AppScan and don't pay anything anymore, meaning it is just a one-time purchase."

"The solution is cheap."

"The product is moderately priced, though it's an investment due to extensive code analysis needs."

More HCL AppScan pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

23%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	14
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	31

Questions from the Community

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What do you like most about HCL AppScan?

The most valuable feature of HCL AppScan is its integration with the SDLC, particularly during the coding phase.

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What needs improvement with HCL AppScan?

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What is your primary use case for HCL AppScan?

I'm currently working with BigFix and HCL AppScan. At least three people in my company are using HCL AppScan. Since we are a reseller, we run it in both lab environments and live production applica...

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Contrast Security Assess

January 2026

Download Contrast Security Assess product report

Buyer's Guide

HCL AppScan

January 2026

Download HCL AppScan product report

Also Known As

Contrast Assess

IBM Security AppScan, Rational AppScan, AppScan

Overview

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

IBM Security AppScan enhances web application security and mobile application security, improves application security program management and strengthens regulatory compliance. By scanning your web and mobile applications prior to deployment, AppScan enables you to identify security vulnerabilities and generate reports and fix recommendations.

HCLSoftware

Sample Customers

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

Essex Technology Group Inc., Cisco, West Virginia University, APIS IT

Buyer's Guide

Contrast Security Assess vs. HCL AppScan

December 2025

Free Report: Contrast Security Assess vs. HCL AppScan

Find out what your peers are saying about Contrast Security Assess vs. HCL AppScan and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.

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