We performed a comparison between Contrast Security Assess and OWASP Zap based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Static Application Security Testing (SAST) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."By far, the thing that was able to provide value was the immediate response while testing ahead of release, in real-time."
"The most valuable feature is the continuous monitoring aspect: the fact that we don't have to wait for scans to complete for the tool to identify vulnerabilities. They're automatically identified through developers' business-as-usual processes."
"No other tool does the runtime scanning like Contrast does. Other static analysis tools do static scanning, but Contrast is runtime analysis, when the routes are exercised. That's when the scan happens. This is a tool that has a very unique capability compared to other tools. That's what I like most about Contrast, that it's runtime."
"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."
"I am impressed with the product's identification of alerts and vulnerabilities."
"It is a stable solution...Contrast Security Assess is one of the first players in this market, so they have experience and customers, especially abroad. Overall, it's a good product."
"We use the Contrast OSS feature that allows us to look at third-party, open-source software libraries, because it has a cool interface where you can look at all the different libraries. It has some really cool additional features where it gives us how many instances in which something has been used... It tells us it has been used 10 times out of 20 workloads, for example. Then we know for sure that OSS is being used."
"When we access the application, it continuously monitors and detects vulnerabilities."
"The stability of the solution is very good."
"This solution has improved my organization because it has made us feel safer doing frequent deployments for web applications. If we have something really big, we might get some professional company in to help us but if we're releasing small products, we will check it ourselves with Zap. It makes it easier and safer."
"You can run it against multiple targets."
"It updates repositories and libraries quickly."
"The ZAP scan and code crawler are valuable features."
"Automatic updates and pull request analysis."
"The reporting is quite intuitive, which gives you a clear indication of what kind of vulnerability you have that you can drill down on to gather more information."
"It scans while you navigate, then you can save the requests performed and work with them later."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see them come up with more scanning rules."
"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."
"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."
"Personalization of the board and how to make it appealing to an organization is something that could be done on their end. The reports could be adaptable to the customer's preferences."
"The out-of-the-box reporting could be improved. We need to write our own APIs to make the reporting more robust."
"Regarding the solution's OSS feature, the one drawback that we do have is that it does not have client-side support. We'll be missing identification of libraries like jQuery or JavaScript, and such, that are client-side."
"The technical support team must be proactive."
"It would be nice to have a solid SQL injection engine built into Zap."
"The product reporting could be improved."
"The solution is somewhat unreliable because after we get the finding, we have to manually verify each of its findings to see whether it's a false positive or a true finding, and it takes time."
"Deployment is somewhat complicated."
"It needs more robust reporting tools."
"The automated vulnerability assessments that the application performs needs to be simplified as well as diversified."
"The reporting feature could be more descriptive."
Contrast Security Assess is ranked 22nd in Static Application Security Testing (SAST) with 11 reviews while OWASP Zap is ranked 7th in Static Application Security Testing (SAST) with 37 reviews. Contrast Security Assess is rated 8.8, while OWASP Zap is rated 7.6. The top reviewer of Contrast Security Assess writes "We're gathering vulnerability data from multiple environments in real time, fundamentally changing how we identify issues in applications". On the other hand, the top reviewer of OWASP Zap writes "Great for automating and testing and has tightened our security ". Contrast Security Assess is most compared with Veracode, Seeker, Fortify WebInspect, HCL AppScan and Qualys Web Application Scanning, whereas OWASP Zap is most compared with SonarQube, Acunetix, Qualys Web Application Scanning, Veracode and PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional. See our Contrast Security Assess vs. OWASP Zap report.
See our list of best Static Application Security Testing (SAST) vendors.
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