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Contrast Security Assess vs PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional 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
30th
Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
28th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
PortSwigger Burp Suite Prof...
Ranking in Application Security Tools
11th
Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
64
Ranking in other categories
Fuzz Testing Tools (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Application Security Tools category, the mindshare of Contrast Security Assess is 0.7%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional is 2.2%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Security Tools
 

Featured Reviews

ToddMcAlister - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Anuradha.Kapoor Kapoor - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers efficient scanning of entire websites but presence of false positive bugs, leading to time-consuming efforts in distinguishing real bugs from false alarms
We have found that so many times, false positive bugs are there, and then we spend a lot of time basically separating them from real bugs. So that's the reason we are looking for some other tool. So we were in discussion with Acunetix. Therefore, the false positive rate is, like, something that we would like to improve. What we are looking for is if this false positive rate goes down because we were OWASP Zap tool users, which was free anyway. But there were a lot of false positives there, and we used to spend a lot of time, like, for security reasons, reproducing those bugs for the development team to fix it. So then we thought, okay, why not we go with the tool? Even if it is not very expensive. But still, every year, we have to renew the license. And we got this tool. Again, we found that in this tool also, even if it is less, there are still a lot of false positive bugs out there. So we again have to spend so much time. So we hired a security tester, who was basically using Acunetix in his previous company for almost three years, and then you said that in that scanning is very slow. The scanning is also slow. Like, sometimes the site scan takes eight hours, six to eight hours. Yeah. And whereas in Acunetix, it took three to four hours. And plus, there are no false positives. I'm not saying none but there's very little. But here, the rate sometimes is very high. These are the two features I think we would like to improve further.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"Assess has an excellent API interface to pull APIs."
"I am impressed with the product's identification of alerts and vulnerabilities."
"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 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."
"By far, the thing that was able to provide value was the immediate response while testing ahead of release, in real-time."
"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."
"I have found the best features to be the performance and there are a lot of additional plugins available."
"I find the attack model quite amazing, where I can write my scripts and load my scripts as well, which helps quite a bit. All the active scanning that it can do is also quite a lot helpful. It speeds up our vulnerability assessment and penetration testing. Right now, I am enjoying its in-browser, which also helps quite a bit. I'm always confused about setting up some proxy, but it really is the big solution we all want."
"The most valuable feature is Burp Collaborator."
"I personally love its capability to automatically and accurately detect vulnerabilities. So, I would say it is the Burp scanner that is THE most powerful, valuable, and an awesome feature."
"The Spider is the most useful feature. It helps to analyze the entire web application, and it finds all the passes and offers an automated identification of security issues."
"I have found this solution has more plugins than other competitors which is a benefit. You are able to attach different plugins to the security scan to add features. For example, you can check to see if there are any payment systems that exist on a server, or username and password brute force analysis."
"This tool is more accurate than the other solutions that we use, and reports fewer false positives."
"The product has a good learning hub."
 

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 should provide more details in the section where it shows that third-party libraries have CVEs or some vulnerabilities."
"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."
"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."
"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'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."
"There is not much automation in the tool."
"We'd like to have more integration potential across all versions of the product."
"If we're running a huge number of scans regularly, it slows down the tool."
"I would like to see the return of the spider mechanism instead of the crawling feature. Burp Suite's earlier version 1.7 had an excellent spider option, and it would be beneficial if Burp incorporated those features into the current version. The crawling techniques used in the current version are not as efficient as those used in earlier versions."
"Scanning APIs using PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional takes a lot of time."
"Currently, the scanning is only available in the full version of Burp, and not in the Community version."
"BurpSuite has some issues regarding authentication with OAT tokens that need to be improved."
"It should provide a better way to integrate with Jenkins so that DAST (dynamic application security testing) can be automated."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 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."
"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 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."
"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."
"For a country such as Sri Lanka, the pricing is not reasonable."
"There are different licenses available that include a free version."
"It has a yearly license. I am satisfied with its price."
"The platform's pricing is reasonable."
"We have one license. The price is very nominal."
"Pricing is not very high. It was around $200."
"At $400 or $500 per license paid annually, it is a very cheap tool."
"We are using the community version, which is free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
22%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Insurance Company
7%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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...
Is OWASP Zap better than PortSwigger Burp Suite Pro?
OWASP Zap and PortSwigger Burp Suite Pro have many similar features. OWASP Zap has web application scanning available with basic security vulnerabilities while Burp Suite Pro has it available with ...
What do you like most about PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional?
The solution helped us discover vulnerabilities in our applications.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional?
I find the price of PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional to be very cost-efficient.
 

Also Known As

Contrast Assess
Burp
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Williams-Sonoma, Autodesk, HUAWEI, Chromeriver, RingCentral, Demandware.
Google, Amazon, NASA, FedEx, P&G, Salesforce
Find out what your peers are saying about Contrast Security Assess vs. PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.