Contrast Security Assess vs OpenText Core Application Security comparison

Contrast Security Assess vs. OpenText Core Application Security

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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

26th

Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

27th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

OpenText Core Application S...

Ranking in Application Security Tools

14th

Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

13th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Application Security Tools category, the mindshare of Contrast Security Assess is 0.8%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenText Core Application Security is 3.9%, down from 5.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Security Tools Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
OpenText Core Application Security	3.9%
Contrast Security Assess	0.8%
Other	95.3%

Application Security Tools

Featured Reviews

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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Jonathan Steyn

Principal Technical Consultant at EOH

Source code analyzer, FPR file generation, reduction of false positives and generates compliance reports, for in-depth analysis

Not challenges with the product itself. The product is very reliable. It does have a steep learning curve. But, again, one thing that Fortify or OpenText does very well is training. There are a lot of free resources and training in the community forums, free training as well as commercial training where users can train on how to use the back-end systems and the scanning engines and how to use command-line arguments because some of the procedures or some of the tools do require a bit of a learning curve. That's the only challenge I've really seen for customers because you have to learn how to use the tool effectively. But Fortify has, in fact, improved its user interface and the way users engage the dashboards and the interfaces. It is intuitive. It's easy to understand. But in some regards, the cybersecurity specialist or AppSec would need a bit of training to engage the user interface and to understand how it functions. But from the point of the reliability index and how powerful the tool is, there's no challenge there. But it's just from a learning perspective; users might need a bit more skill to use the tool. The user interface isn't that tedious. It's not that difficult to understand. When I initially learned how to use the interfaces, I was able to master it within a week and was able to use it quite effectively. So training is required. All skills are needed to learn how to use the tool. I would like to see more enhancements in the dashboards. Dashboards are available. They do need some configuration and settings. But I would like to see more business intelligence capabilities within the tool. It's not particularly a cybersecurity function, but, for instance, business impact analysis or other features where you can actually use business intelligence capabilities within your security tool. That would be remarkable because not only do you have a cybersecurity tool, but you also have a tool that can give you business impact analysis and some other measurements. A bit more intelligence in terms of that from a cybersecurity perspective would be remarkable.

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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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

More Contrast Security Assess pros

"Its ability to perform different types of scans, keep everything in one place, and track the triage process in Fortify SSC stands out."

"The solution is user-friendly. One feature I find very effective is the tool's automatic scanning capability. It scans replicas of the code developers write and automatically detects any vulnerabilities. The integration with CI/CD tools is also useful for plugins."

"The user interface is good."

"While using Micro Focus Fortify on Demand we have been very happy with the results and findings."

"Audit workbench: for on-the-fly defect auditing."

"The licensing was good."

"The most valuable features are the detailed reporting and the ability to set up deep scanning of the software, both of which are in the same place."

"The solution is very fast."

More OpenText Core Application Security pros

Cons

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

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

"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."

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

"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 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."

More Contrast Security Assess cons

"New technologies and DevOps could be improved. Fortify on Demand can be slow (slower than other vendors) to support new technologies or new software versions."

"Sometimes when we run a full scan, we have a bunch of issues in the code. We should not have any issues."

"Fortify on Demand could be improved with support in Russia."

"In terms of communication, they can integrate a few more third-party tools. It would be great if we can have more options for microservice communication. They can also improve the securability a bit more because security is one of the biggest aspects these days when you are using the cloud. Some more security features would be really helpful."

"Temenos's (T-24) info basic is a separate programming interface, and such proprietary platforms and programming interfaces were not easily supported by the out-of-the-box versions of Fortify."

"They could provide features for artificial intelligence similar to other vendors."

"We typically do our bulk uploads of our scans with some automation at the end of the development cycle but the scanning can take a lot of time. If you were doing all of it at regular intervals it would still consume a lot of time. This could procedure could improve."

"Primarily for a complex, advanced website, they don't really understand some of the functionalities. So for instance, they could tell us that there is a vulnerability because somebody could possibly do something, but they don't really understand the code to realize that we actually negate that vulnerability through some other mechanism in the program. In addition, the technical support is just not there. We have open tickets. They don't respond. Even if they respond, we're not seeing eye to eye. As the company got sold and bought, the support got worse."

More OpenText Core Application Security cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

"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."

"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 subscription model, on a per-scan basis, is a bit expensive. That's another reason we are not using it for all the apps."

"The solution is a little expensive."

"Fortify on Demand is moderately priced, but its pricing could be more flexible."

"The licensing was good because the licenses have the heavy centralized server."

"Buying a license would be feasible for regular use. For intermittent use, the cloud-based option can be used (Fortify on Demand)."

"We are still using the trial version at this point but I can already see from the trial version alone that it is a good product. For others, I would say that Fortify on Demand might look expensive at the beginning, but it is very powerful and so you shouldn't be put off by the price."

"It's a yearly contract, but I don't remember the dollar amount."

"There are different costs for Micro Focus Fortify on Demand depending on the assessments you want to use. There is only a standard license needed to use the solution."

More OpenText Core Application Security pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

23%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

19%

Manufacturing Company

15%

Computer Software Company

10%

Government

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	16
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	43

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Contrast Security Assess?

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

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 ...

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...

What do you like most about Micro Focus Fortify on Demand?

It helps deploy and track changes easily as per time-to-time market upgrades.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Micro Focus Fortify on Demand?

In comparison with other tools, they're competitive. It is not more expensive than other solutions, but their pricing is competitive. The licenses for Fortify On Demand are generally bought in unit...

What needs improvement with Micro Focus Fortify on Demand?

There are frequent complaints about false positives from Fortify. One day it may pass a scan with no issues, and the next day, without any code changes, it will report vulnerabilities such as passw...

OpenText Dynamic Application Security Testing vs Contrast Security Assess

Comparisons

Compared 23% of the time

Seeker Interactive vs Contrast Security Assess

Compared 15% of the time

SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) vs Contrast Security Assess

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PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional vs Contrast Security Assess

Compared 10% of the time

Qualys Web Application Scanning vs Contrast Security Assess

Compared 9% of the time

More Contrast Security Assess Competitors

SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) vs OpenText Core Application Security

Compared 16% of the time

Checkmarx One vs OpenText Core Application Security

Compared 13% of the time

Coverity Static vs OpenText Core Application Security

Compared 9% of the time

Veracode vs OpenText Core Application Security

Compared 9% of the time

GitHub Advanced Security vs OpenText Core Application Security

Compared 6% of the time

More OpenText Core Application Security Competitors

Product Reports

Contrast Security Assess

Download Contrast Security Assess product report

OpenText Core Application Security

Download OpenText Core Application Security product report

OpenText Core Application Security report

Also Known As

Contrast Assess

Micro Focus Fortify on Demand

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

OpenText Core Application Security offers robust features like static and dynamic scanning, real-time vulnerability tracking, and seamless integration with development platforms, designed to enhance code security and reduce operational costs.

OpenText Core Application Security is a cloud-based, on-demand service providing accurate and deep scanning capabilities with detailed reporting. Its integrations with development platforms ensure an enhanced security layer in the development lifecycle, benefiting users by lowering operational costs and facilitating efficient remediation. The platform addresses needs for intuitive interfaces, API support, and comprehensive vulnerability assessments, helping improve code security and accelerate time-to-market. Despite its strengths, challenges exist around false positives, report clarity, and language support, alongside confusing pricing and package options. Enhancements are sought in areas like CI/CD pipeline configuration, report visualization, scan times, and integration with third-party tools such as GitLab, container scanning, and software composition analysis.

What features define OpenText Core Application Security?

Static and Dynamic Scanning: Offers thorough analysis to identify vulnerabilities during development.
Real-time Vulnerability Tracking: Continuously updates and monitors potential security threats.
Seamless Development Platform Integration: Enhances security processes without disrupting workflows.
Cloud-Based Service: Provides flexible, on-demand security capabilities with accurate results.
API Support: Allows smooth integration and automation within existing systems.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

Reduced Operational Costs: Optimizes resources by lowering costs associated with security management.
Efficient Remediation: Speeds up the process of identifying and resolving vulnerabilities.
Enhanced Code Security: Strengthens overall application security during the development lifecycle.
Accelerated Time-to-Market: Streamlines development stages by integrating essential security tools.

Industries like mobile applications, e-commerce, and banking leverage OpenText Core Application Security for its ability to identify vulnerabilities such as SQL injections. Integrating seamlessly with DevSecOps and security auditing processes, this tool supports developers in writing safer code, ensuring secure application deployment and enhancing software assurance.

OpenText

Sample Customers

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

SAP, Aaron's, British Gas, FICO, Cox Automative, Callcredit Information Group, Vital and more.

Contrast Security Assess vs. OpenText Core Application Security