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Coverity vs Synopsys Defensics 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
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
43
Ranking in other categories
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (5th)
Synopsys Defensics
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Fuzz Testing Tools (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Quality Assurance solutions, they serve different purposes. Coverity is designed for Static Application Security Testing (SAST) and holds a mindshare of 7.2%, up 6.7% compared to last year.
Synopsys Defensics, on the other hand, focuses on Fuzz Testing Tools, holds 22.1% mindshare, up 15.4% since last year.
Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
Fuzz Testing Tools
 

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.…
SK
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

"In my opinion, the most effective Coverity feature for identifying critical vulnerabilities is the extra checks, which offers deep analysis."
"Coverity is easy to use and easy to integrate with CI."
"Coverity integrates with issue-tracking systems like Jira and provides email notifications, alerts, and other features."
"The most valuable feature of Coverity is that it shows examples of what is actually wrong with the code."
"The most valuable feature of Coverity is its interprocedural analysis, which is advantageous because it compares favorably with other tools in terms of security and code analysis."
"The most valuable feature is that there were not a whole lot of false positives, at least on the codebases that I looked at."
"The features I find most valuable is that our entire company can publish the analysis results into our central space."
"Coverity gives advisory and deviation features, which are some of the parts I liked."
"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

"It would be great if we could customize the rules to focus on critical issues."
"There is an extra step in my organization that involves uploading to servers, which adds overhead."
"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."
"We actually specified several checkers, but we found some checkers had a higher false positive rate. I think this is a problem. Because we have to waste some time is really the issue because the issue is not an issue. I mean, the tool pauses or an issue, but the same issue is the filter now.Some check checkers cannot find some issues, but sometimes they find issues that are not relevant, right, that are not really issues. Some customisation mechanism can be added in the next release so that we can define our Checker. The Modelling feature provided by Coverity helps in finding more information for potential issues but it is not mature enough, it should be mature. The fast testing feature for security testing campaign can be added as well. So if you correctly integrate it with the training team, maybe you can help us to find more potential issues."
"Ideally, it would have a user-based license that does not have a restriction in the number of lines of code."
"I had tried integrating the tool with Azure DevOps, but the report I got stated that my team faced many challenges."
"The product could be enhanced by providing video troubleshooting guides, making issue resolution more accessible. Troubleshooting without visual guides can be time-consuming."
"The quality of the code needs improvement."
"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."
"Codenomicon Defensics should be more advanced for the testing sector. It should be somewhat easy and flexible to install."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is very reasonable compared to other platforms. It is based on a three year license."
"Coverity is quite expensive."
"Coverity’s price is on the higher side. It should be lower."
"The solution's pricing is comparable to other products."
"I rate Coverity's price a ten on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive."
"Coverity is very expensive."
"The price is competitive with other solutions."
"Offers varying prices for different companies"
"Licensing is a bit expensive."
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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
20%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
9%
University
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
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.
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

Synopsys Static Analysis
Defensics, 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 Sonar, Veracode, Checkmarx and others in Static Application Security Testing (SAST). Updated: June 2025.
860,632 professionals have used our research since 2012.