We performed a comparison between Acunetix and Contrast Security Assess based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Application Security Tools solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The solution is highly stable."
"The tool's most valuable feature is scan configurations. We use it for external physical applications. The scanning time depends on the application's code."
"The automated approach to these repetitive discovery attempts would take days to do manually and therefore it helps reduce the time needed to do an assessment."
"The most valuable feature of Acunetix is the UI and the scan results are simple."
"For us, the most valuable aspect of the solution is the log-sequence feature."
"It can operate both as a standalone and it can be integrated with other applications, which makes it a very versatile solution to have."
"The usability and overall scan results are good."
"Acunetix has an awesome crawler. It gives a referral site map of near targets and also goes really deep to find all the inputs without issues. This was valuable because it helped me find some files or directories, like web admin panels without authentication, which were hidden."
"When we access the application, it continuously monitors and detects 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."
"By far, the thing that was able to provide value was the immediate response while testing ahead of release, in real-time."
"The accuracy of the solution in identifying vulnerabilities is better than any other product we've used, far and away. In our internal comparisons among different tools, Contrast consistently finds more impactful vulnerabilities, and also identifies vulnerabilities that are nearly guaranteed to be there, meaning that the chance of false positives is very low."
"Assess has an excellent API interface to pull APIs."
"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."
"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."
"I am impressed with the product's identification of alerts and vulnerabilities."
"The jargon used makes it difficult for project managers to understand the issues, and the technical explanations used make it difficult for developers to understand issues. These things should be simplified much more. That would be very helpful for us when explaining to them what needs to be fixed. The report output needs to be simplified."
"Integration into other tools is very limited for Acunetix. While we're trying to incorporate a CI/CD process where we're integrating with JIRA and we're integrating with Jenkins and Chef, it becomes problematic. Other tools give you a high integration capability to connect into different solutions that you may already have, like JIRA."
"We want to see how much bandwidth usage it consumes. When we monitor traffic we have issues with the consumption and throttling of the traffic."
"The pricing is a bit on the higher side."
"There is room for improvement in website authentication because I've seen other products that can do it much better."
"The solution can be improved by adding the ability to scan subdomains automatically, and by providing reports that can be exported to external databases to share with other solutions."
"The only problem that they have is the price. It is a bit expensive, and you cannot change the number of applications for the whole year."
"I had some issues with the JSON parameters where it found some strange vulnerabilities, but it didn't alert the person using it or me about these vulnerabilities, e.g., an error for SQL injection."
"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."
"I would like to see them come up with more scanning rules."
"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."
"Contrast Security Assess covers a wide range of applications like .NET Framework, Java, PSP, Node.js, etc. But there are some like Ubuntu and the .NET Core which are not covered. They have it in their roadmap to have these agents. If they have that, we will have complete coverage."
"The solution needs to improve flexibility...The scalability of the product is a problem in the solution, especially from a commercial 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."
"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."
"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."
Acunetix is ranked 17th in Application Security Tools with 26 reviews while Contrast Security Assess is ranked 31st in Application Security Tools with 11 reviews. Acunetix is rated 7.6, while Contrast Security Assess is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Acunetix writes "Fantastic reporting features hindered by slow scanning ". On the other hand, 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". Acunetix is most compared with OWASP Zap, Tenable.io Web Application Scanning, PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional, HCL AppScan and Fortify WebInspect, whereas Contrast Security Assess is most compared with Veracode, Seeker, Fortify WebInspect, HCL AppScan and Checkmarx One. See our Acunetix vs. Contrast Security Assess report.
See our list of best Application Security Tools vendors and best Application Security Testing (AST) vendors.
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