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Fortify Application Defender vs GitGuardian Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 2, 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

Fortify Application Defender
Ranking in Application Security Tools
24th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
GitGuardian Platform
Ranking in Application Security Tools
6th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (4th), Data Loss Prevention (DLP) (8th), Threat Intelligence Platforms (TIP) (4th), Software Supply Chain Security (5th), DevSecOps (4th), Non-Human Identity Management (NHIM) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Application Security Tools category, the mindshare of Fortify Application Defender is 1.2%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of GitGuardian Platform is 1.2%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Security Tools Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
GitGuardian Platform1.2%
Fortify Application Defender1.2%
Other97.6%
Application Security Tools
 

Featured Reviews

VS
CTO at Abcl
Useful for fast code review in devOps pipelines
I rate the tool's scalability a seven out of ten. However, I'm concerned about how it handles an increasing number of lines of code. As the complexity grows, so does the time it takes for the tool to review everything. I want more clarity on how Fortify Application Defender handles multiple threats. We have numerous endpoints, but the tool runs in our pipeline, meaning it operates in the cloud. All our code is configured there, and the tool runs integration testing, unit testing, user testing, and final production code tests. It's a day-to-day experience. It's utilized almost every day as part of our pipeline runs. Each team responsible for integration testing, human testing, user access testing, and preproduction testing runs it whenever they take a build.
Ney Roman - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Engineer at Deuna App
Facilitates efficient secret management and improves development processes
Regarding the exceptions in GitGuardian Platform, we know that within the platform we have a way to accept a path or a directory from a repository, but it is not that visible at the very beginning. You have to figure out where to search for it, and once you have it, it is really good, but it is not that visible at the beginning. This should be made more exposed. The documentation could be better because it was not that comprehensively documented. When we started working with GitGuardian Platform, it was difficult to find some specific use cases, and we were not aware of that. It might have improved now, but at that time, it was not something we would recommend.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Its ability to find security defects is valuable."
"The information from Fortify Application Defender on how to fix and solve issues is very good compared to other solutions."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to automatically feed it rules what it's coupled with the WebInspect dynamic application scanning technology."
"The solution helped us to improve the code quality of our organization."
"We are able to provide out customers with a secure application after development. They are no longer left wondering if they are vulnerable to different threats within the market following deployment."
"The most valuable feature is that it analyzes data in real-time."
"The tool's most valuable feature is software composition analysis. This feature works well with my .NET applications, providing a better understanding of library vulnerabilities."
"The most valuable features of Fortify Application Defender are the code packages that are default."
"The most valuable feature is the general incident reporting system."
"What is particularly helpful is that having GitGuardian show that the code failed a check enables us to automatically pass the resolution to the author. We don't have to rely on the reviewer to assign it back to him or her. Letting the authors solve their own problems before they get to the reviewer has significantly improved visibility and reduced the remediation time from multiple days to minutes or hours. Given how time-consuming code reviews can be, it saves some of our more scarce resources."
"The breadth of the solution detection capabilities is pretty good. They have good categories and a lot of different types of secrets... it gives us a great range when it comes to types of secrets, and that's good for us."
"A high number of our exposures are remediated by developers before security needs to step in, as the self-healing playbook process engages them automatically. This results in issues being resolved within minutes, saving significant effort from the security team in tracking down or communicating with developers."
"GitGuardian public leak detection significantly enhances our organization's data security by continuously monitoring public repositories."
"I like that GitGuardian automatically notifies the developer who committed the change. The security team doesn't need to act as the intermediary and tell the developer there is an alert. The alert goes directly to the developer."
"GitGuardian Internal Monitoring has helped increase our secrets detection rate by several orders of magnitude. This is a hard metric to get. For example, if we knew what our secrets were and where they were, we wouldn't need GitGuardian or these types of solutions. There could be a million more secrets that GitGuardian doesn't detect, but it is basically impossible to find them by searching for them."
"You can also assign tasks to specific teams or people to complete, such as assigning something to the "blue team" or saying that this person needs to do this, and that person needs to do that. That is a great feature because you can actually manage your team internally in GitGuardian."
 

Cons

"The false positive rate should be lower."
"Support for older compilers/IDEs is lacking."
"Fortify Application Defender could improve by supporting more code languages, such as GRAAS and Groovy."
"The biggest complaint that I have heard concerns additional platform support because right now, it only supports applications that are written in .NET and Java."
"Fortify Application Defender gives a lot of false positives."
"The solution could improve the time it takes to scan. When comparing it to SonarQube it does it in minutes while in Fortify Application Defender it can take hours."
"The licensing can be a little complex."
"The product should integrate industry-standard code review tools internally with its system. This would streamline the coding process, as developers wouldn't need multiple tools for code review and security checks. Many independent and open-source tools are available, from Apache to various libraries. Using multiple DevOps pipeline tools can slow the turnaround time."
"Automated Jira tickets would be fantastic. At the moment, I believe we have to go in and click to create a Jira ticket. It would be nice to automate."
"I'm excited about the possibility of Public Postman scanning being integrated with GitGuardian in the future. Additionally, I'm interested in exploring the potential use of honeytokens, which seems like a compelling approach to lure and identify attackers."
"The main thing for me is the customization for some of the healthcare-specific identifiers that we want to validate. There should be some ability, which is coming in the near future, to have custom identifiers. Being in healthcare, we have pretty specific patterns that we need to match for PHI or PII. Having that would add a little bit extra to it."
"Other solutions have a live chat feature that provides instant results. Waiting for an agent to reply to an email is less ideal than an instant conversation with a support employee. That's a complaint so minor I almost hesitate to mention it."
"For some repositories, there are a lot of incidents. For example, one repository says 255 occurrences, so I assume these are 255 alerts and nobody is doing anything about them. These could be false positives. However, I cannot assess it correctly, because I haven't been closing these false positives myself. From the dashboard, I can see that for some of the repositories, there have been a lot of closing of these occurrences, so I would assume there are a lot of false positives. A ballpark estimate would be 60% being false positives. One of the arguments from the developers against this tool is the number of false positives."
"GitGuardian's hook and dashboard scanners are the two entities. They should work together as one. We've seen several discrepancies where the hook is not being flagged on the dashboard. I still think they need to do some fine-tuning around that. We don't want to waste time."
"One of our current challenges is that the GitGuardian platform identifies encrypted secrets and statements as sensitive information even though they're secured."
"The purchasing process is convoluted compared to Snyk, the other tool we use. It's like night and day because you only need to punch in your credit card, and you're set. With GitGuardian, getting a quote took two or three weeks. We paid for it in December but have not settled that payment yet."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The base licensing costs for the SaaS platform is about $900 USD per application, per year."
"Fortify Application Defender is very expensive."
"The licensing is very complex, it's project based and can range from $10,000 to $200,000+ depending on the project type and size."
"The price of this solution could be less expensive."
"I rate the solution's pricing a five out of ten. It comes as an annual cloud subscription. The tool's pricing is around 50 lakhs."
"The product’s price is much higher than other tools."
"It's competitively priced compared to others. Overall, the secret detection sector is expensive, but we are very happy with the value we get."
"The internal side is cheap per user. It is annual pricing based on the number of users."
"It's not cheap, but it's not crazy expensive either."
"We don't have a huge number of users, but its yearly rate was quite reasonable when compared to other per-seat solutions that we looked at... Having a free plan for a small number of users was really great. If you're a small team, I don't see why you wouldn't want to get started with it."
"I compared the solution to a couple of other solutions, and I think it is very competitively priced."
"The pricing is reasonable. GitGuardian is one of the most recent security tools we've adopted. When it came time to renew it, there was no doubt about it. It is licensed per developer, so it scales nicely with the number of repos that we have. We can create new repositories and break up work. It isn't scaling based on the amount of data it's consuming."
"It's fairly priced, as it performs a lot of analysis and is a valuable tool."
"I am only aware of the base price. I do not know what happened with our purchasing team in discussions with GitGuardian. I was not privy to the overall contract, but in terms of the base MSRP price, I found it reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Government
16%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise13
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Fortify Application Defender?
I find the configuration of rules in Fortify Application Defender useful. Its integration is also easy.
What needs improvement with Fortify Application Defender?
The product should integrate industry-standard code review tools internally with its system. This would streamline the coding process, as developers wouldn't need multiple tools for code review and...
What is your primary use case for Fortify Application Defender?
We use the solution for fast code review. It is integrated into our DevOps pipeline.
What do you like most about GitGuardian Internal Monitoring ?
It's also worth mentioning that GitGuardian is unique because they have a free tier that we've been using for the first twelve months. It provides full functionality for smaller teams. We're a smal...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for GitGuardian Internal Monitoring ?
It's competitively priced compared to others. Overall, the secret detection sector is expensive, but we are happy with the value we get.
What needs improvement with GitGuardian Internal Monitoring ?
GitGuardian Platform does what it is designed to do, but it still generates many false positives. We utilize the automated playbooks from GitGuardian Platform, and we are enhancing them. We will pr...
 

Also Known As

HPE Fortify Application Defender, Micro Focus Fortify Application Defender
GitGuardian Internal Monitoring, GitGuardian Public Monitoring
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ServiceMaster, Saltworks, SAP
Widely adopted by developer communities, GitGuardian is used by over 600 thousand developers and leading companies, including Snowflake, Orange, Iress, Mirantis, Maven Wave, ING, BASF, and Bouygues Telecom.
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortify Application Defender vs. GitGuardian Platform and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
881,707 professionals have used our research since 2012.