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Coverity vs Qualys Web Application Scanning comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 30, 2025

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
Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
43
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Qualys Web Application Scan...
Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
9th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
38
Ranking in other categories
Application Security Tools (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Static Application Security Testing (SAST) category, the mindshare of Coverity is 7.2%, up from 6.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Qualys Web Application Scanning is 2.1%, down from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
 

Featured Reviews

Jaile Sebes - PeerSpot reviewer
Resolving critical software issues demands faster implementation and better integration
We use Coverity primarily to find issues such as software bugs and memory leaks, especially in C++ and C# projects. It helps us identify deadlocks, synchronization issues, and product crashes Coverity has been instrumental in resolving product crashes by detecting various issues like deadlocks.…
Kelvin Oladipo - PeerSpot reviewer
User-friendly scanning provides valuable vulnerability insights, but pricing improvements are needed
Qualys Web Application Scanning ( /products/qualys-web-application-scanning-reviews ) is user-friendly, easy to understand, easy to use, and easy to deploy. Credential scanning is very effective because it goes in-depth into the system, crawling the pages, and reporting on vulnerabilities. The product helps by providing options for remediating vulnerabilities it finds, making it really useful.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Coverity provides excellent compliance and other features, which is a very good part."
"The most valuable feature of Coverity is that it shows examples of what is actually wrong with the code."
"It's pretty stable. I rate the stability of Coverity nine out of ten."
"The solution has improved our code quality and security very well."
"The most valuable feature is that there were not a whole lot of false positives, at least on the codebases that I looked at."
"We were very comfortable with the initial setup."
"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."
"In my opinion, the most effective Coverity feature for identifying critical vulnerabilities is the extra checks, which offers deep analysis."
"It is a cloud-based solution, so it is easy to scale."
"Qualys Web Application Scanning is user-friendly, easy to understand, easy to use, and easy to deploy."
"It combines both web application vulnerability management and internal vulnerability management on one platform and dashboard. Usually, you have to purchase separate tools."
"It is easy to use."
"The Qualys Web Application Scanning solution offers a single comprehensive console and consolidated reporting, covering all aspects from on-prem to cloud and compliance, etcetera."
"I have found the detection of vulnerabilities tool thorough with good results and the graphical display output to be wonderful and full of colors. It allows many types of outputs, such as bar and chart previews."
"The product prevents possible vulnerabilities in our network."
"With our vulnerabilities under control, it's putting our services in compliance and minimizing our risk for exposure."
 

Cons

"The solution's user interface and quality gate could be improved."
"It would be great if we could customize the rules to focus on critical issues."
"Coverity takes a lot of time to dereference null pointers."
"Right now, the Coverity executable is around 1.2GB to download. If they can reduce it to approximately 600 or 700MB, that would be great. If they decrease the executable, it will be much easier to work in an environment like Docker."
"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."
"The solution is a bit complex to use in comparison to other products that have many plugins."
"There should be additional IDE support."
"Sometimes it's a bit hard to figure out how to use the product’s UI."
"It should have better automatic reporting."
"The authenticated scanning feature could be improved by adding support for real-time scanning tokens and authorization tokens."
"The solution needs to adjust its pricing. They should make it more affordable."
"The product's pricing could be better."
"They should try to include business logic vulnerabilities in the scanner testing."
"There should be better visibility into the application."
"We have many websites. We don't force scanning on all of them at once because it's taking some time."
"The scanner reports a lot of false positives, which is something that needs to be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate Coverity's price a ten on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive."
"The licensing fees are based on the number of lines of code."
"Coverity is quite expensive."
"I would rate Coverity's pricing as a nine out of ten. It's already very expensive, and it's a problem for us to get more licenses due to the price. The pricing model has some good aspects - for example, a personal license gives access to all languages without code limitations, which is better than some competitors. However, it's still a lot of money for us to spend."
"I would rate the tool's pricing a one out of ten."
"The pricing is on the expensive side, and we are paying for a couple of items."
"The price is competitive with other solutions."
"Coverity’s price is on the higher side. It should be lower."
"We are on an annual license for the solution and the pricing could be more affordable."
"The cost is $30,000 USD for one year to cover WAS (Web Application Security) and the VM (Virtual Machine) security in a company with 200 employees."
"Qualys has an IT-based licensing based on a yearly license, which is a good way of handling it. However, in some cases, when we do the PCI scanning, the host will not like the scanning and we lose the IT license. So, this could be improved."
"From my perspective, it is a budget-friendly option."
"Try the free trial of the product to understand the basic working mechanisms.​"
"The product is expensive, at least initially, in comparison to other products in this category."
"I rate the software’s pricing a six out of ten."
"There are different options available with respect to licensing."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
32%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
4%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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.
What do you like most about Qualys Web Application Scanning?
The vulnerability management feature is a strong one. And also the patch management feature.
What needs improvement with Qualys Web Application Scanning?
I would like it to be cheaper because it is a bit expensive compared to competitors like Tenable Nessus ( /products/tenable-nessus-reviews ). After using the product for a year, I might have more s...
 

Also Known As

Synopsys Static Analysis
Qualys WAS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

SAP, Mega International, Thales Alenia Space
BskyB, Cartagena, ClearPoint Learning Systems, Connect Group, du, Fortrex Technologies, HBOR, HDI, Highlights for Children, The Lithuanian State Enterprise Centre of Registers, City of Miami Beach, Microsoft, MidlandHR, MSCI Inc., Northern Arizona University, Ofgem, Olympus Europa, PhoneFactor, RTL Nederland, ThousandEyes, VGZ Organisatie B.V.
Find out what your peers are saying about Coverity vs. Qualys Web Application Scanning and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.