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Coverity Static vs Defensics Protocol Fuzzing comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Coverity Static
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
43
Ranking in other categories
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (6th)
Defensics Protocol Fuzzing
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Fuzz Testing Tools (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Quality Assurance solutions, they serve different purposes. Coverity Static is designed for Static Application Security Testing (SAST) and holds a mindshare of 4.2%, down 7.9% compared to last year.
Defensics Protocol Fuzzing, on the other hand, focuses on Fuzz Testing Tools, holds 18.3% mindshare, down 21.0% since last year.
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Coverity Static4.2%
SonarQube18.2%
Checkmarx One10.3%
Other67.3%
Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
Fuzz Testing Tools Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Defensics Protocol Fuzzing18.3%
PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional32.7%
GitLab26.7%
Other22.299999999999997%
Fuzz Testing Tools
 

Featured Reviews

KT
Software Engineering Manager at Visteon Corporation
Using tools for compliance is beneficial but cost concerns persist
We have been using Coverity for quite a long period. It has been fine for our needs. I would rate Coverity between eight to nine, though the cost is high. I would rate their support from Coverity as six. That is the main complaint, but we still appreciate having it.
SK
Senior Technical Lead at HCL Technologies
Product security tests for switches and router sections
Codenomicon Defensics should be more advanced for the testing sector. It should be somewhat easy and flexible to install. What I see in the documentation isn't that. Even if something doesn't malfunction, sometimes it is hard to install and execute. The product needs video documentation. This would help a lot more.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution has improved our code quality and security very well."
"The features I find most valuable is that our entire company can publish the analysis results into our central space."
"The ability to scan code gives us details of existing and potential vulnerabilities. What really matters for us is to ensure that we are able to catch vulnerabilities ahead of time."
"Coverity provides excellent compliance and other features, which is a very good part."
"I encountered a bug with Coverity, and I opened a ticket. Support provided me with a workaround. So it's working at the moment, or at least it seems to be."
"We were very comfortable with the initial setup."
"Considering the analysis part and the benchmarking process involving the product that my company carried out, the solution is good for finding bugs and violations"
"The reporting feature is up to the mark."
"The product is related to US usage with TLS contact fees, i.e. how more data center connections will help lower networking costs."
"Whatever the test suit they give, it is intelligent. It will understand the protocol and it will generate the test cases based on the protocol: protocol, message sequence, protocol, message structure... Because of that, we can eliminate a lot of unwanted test cases, so we can execute the tests and complete them very quickly."
"We have found multiple issues in our embedded system network protocols, related to buffer overflow. We have reduced some of these issues."
 

Cons

"There is an extra step in my organization that involves uploading to servers, which adds overhead."
"The reporting tool integration process is sometimes slow."
"I would like to see integration with popular IDEs, such as Eclipse."
"Sometimes, vulnerabilities remain unidentified even after setting up the rules."
"Coverity is far from perfection, and I'm not 100 percent sure it's helping me find what I need to find in my role. We need exactly what we are looking for, i.e. security errors and vulnerabilities. It doesn't seem to be reporting while we are changing our code."
"Coverity's implementation cycle is very slow when integrating changes, especially for problems related to event handling and memory leaks."
"The level of vulnerability that this solution covers could be improved compared to other open source tools."
"The quality of the code needs improvement."
"Codenomicon Defensics should be more advanced for the testing sector. It should be somewhat easy and flexible to install."
"It does not support the complete protocol stack. There are some IoT protocols that are not supported and new protocols that are not supported."
"Sometimes, when we are testing embedded devices, when we trigger the test cases, the target will crash immediately. It is very difficult for us to identify the root cause of the crash because they do not provide sophisticated tools on the target side. They cover only the client-side application... They do not have diagnostic tools for the target side. Rather, they have them but they are very minimal and not very helpful."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Coverity is very expensive."
"The solution's pricing is comparable to other products."
"I would rate the tool's pricing a one out of ten."
"This is a pretty expensive solution. The overall value of the solution could be improved if the price was reduced. Licensing is done on an annual basis."
"The tool's price is somewhere in the middle. It's neither cheap nor expensive. I would rate the pricing a five out of ten."
"The pricing is on the expensive side, and we are paying for a couple of items."
"Depending on the usage types, one has to opt for different types of licenses from Coverity, especially to be able to use areas like report viewing or report generation."
"The licensing fees are based on the number of lines of code."
"Licensing is a bit expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
32%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Healthcare Company
4%
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Retailer
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise31
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

How would you decide between Coverity and Sonarqube?
We researched Coverity, but in the end, we chose SonarQube. SonarQube is a tool for reviewing code quality and security. It helps to guide our development teams during code reviews by providing rem...
What do you like most about Coverity?
The solution has improved our code quality and security very well.
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Also Known As

Synopsys Static Analysis
Codenomicon Defensics
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

SAP, Mega International, Thales Alenia Space
Coriant, CERT-FI, Next Generation Networks
Find out what your peers are saying about SonarSource Sàrl, Veracode, Checkmarx and others in Static Application Security Testing (SAST). Updated: February 2026.
881,733 professionals have used our research since 2012.