We performed a comparison between Coverity and Klocwork based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Result: Based on the parameters we compared, Klocwork comes out ahead of Coverity. Although both products have valuable features and can be estimated as high-end solutions, our reviewers found that Coverity is expensive and its support has a slow response time.
"One of the most valuable features is Contributing Events. That particular feature helps the developer understand the root cause of a defect. So you can locate the starting point of the defect and figure out exactly how it is being exploited."
"The interface of Coverity is quite good, and it is also easy to use."
"The most valuable feature is that there were not a whole lot of false positives, at least on the codebases that I looked at."
"This solution is easy to use."
"Provides software security, and helps to find potential security bugs or defects."
"The solution has improved our code quality and security very well."
"The solution has helped to increase staff productivity and improved our work significantly by approximately 20 percent."
"The product has been beneficial in logging functionality, allowing me to categorize vulnerabilities based on severity. This aids in providing updated reports on subsequent scans."
"The most valuable feature of Klocwork is finding defects while you're doing the coding. For example, if you have an IDE plug-in of Klocwork on Visual Studio or Eclipse, you can find the faults; similar to using spell check on Word, you can find out defects during the development phase, which means that you don't have to wait till the development is over to find the flaws and address the deficiencies. I also find language support in Klocwork good because it used to support only C, C++, C#, and Java, but now, it also supports Java scripts and Python."
"I like not having to dig through false positives. Chasing down a false positive can take anywhere from five minutes for a small easy one, then something that is complicated and goes through a whole bunch of different class cases, and it can take up to 45 minutes to an hour to find out if it is a false positive or not."
"The ability to create custom checkers is a plus."
"The most valuable feature is the Incremental analysis."
"Klocwork's most valuable feature is the static code analysis feature. It detects the potential problem earlier to allow the developer to receive feedback quickly and then address it before it becomes a problem."
"The reporting helps us understand the trend of our results and whether we improve over time. We can see the history within Klocwork's server architecture and know that we're making things better. It creates a great story for our management. We can demonstrate value and how our software is developing over time."
"There is a central Klocwork server at our headquarter in France so we connect the client directly to the server on-premises remotely."
"On-the-fly analysis and incremental analysis are the best parts of Klocwork. Currently, we are using both of these features very effectively."
"Coverity takes a lot of time to dereference null pointers."
"The product could be enhanced by providing video troubleshooting guides, making issue resolution more accessible. Troubleshooting without visual guides can be time-consuming."
"Coverity could improve the ease of use. Sometimes things become difficult and you need to follow the guides from the website but the guides could be better."
"Ideally, it would have a user-based license that does not have a restriction in the number of lines of code."
"Sometimes, vulnerabilities remain unidentified even after setting up the rules."
"We use GitHub and Gitflow, and Coverity does not fit with Gitflow. I have to create a screen for our branches, and it's a pain for developers. It has been difficult to integrate Coverity with our system."
"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."
"Some features are not performing well, like duplicate detection and switch case situations."
"The way to define the rules is too complex. The definition/rules for static analysis could be automated according to various SILs, so as to avoid confusion."
"Under NIST cybersecurity standards, we must address vulnerabilities within a specified time after discovering them. When we try to propagate those updates and fixes through the system, it would be nice if the clients could reconnect to the existing server or have the server dynamically updated in some way. I know that isn't easy, but maybe processes could be enhanced to make that more streamlined from a DevOps perspective."
"Modern languages, such as Angular and .NET, should be included as a part of Klocwork. They have recently added Kotlin as a part of their project, but we would like to see more languages in Klocwork. That's the reason we are using Coverity as a backup for some of the other languages."
"Now the only issue we have is that whenever we need to get the code we have to build it first. Then we can get the report."
"I believe it should support more languages, such as Python and JavaScript."
"The main problem is that since it only parses the code, the warnings or the problems that are given as a result of the report can sometimes require a lot of effort to analyze."
"This solution could be improved if they offered support of more languages including Ada and Golang. They currently only support seven languages."
"We bought Klocwork, but it was limited to one little program, but the program is now sort of failing. So, we have a license for usage on a program that is sort of failing, and we really can't use the license on anything else."
Coverity is ranked 4th in Static Application Security Testing (SAST) with 33 reviews while Klocwork is ranked 11th in Static Application Security Testing (SAST) with 20 reviews. Coverity is rated 7.8, while Klocwork is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Coverity writes "Best SAST tool to check software quality issues". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Klocwork writes "Their technical team helps us get the most out of the solution, but we've faced some stability problems in our environment". Coverity is most compared with SonarQube, Fortify on Demand, Checkmarx One, Veracode and Polyspace Code Prover, whereas Klocwork is most compared with SonarQube, Polyspace Code Prover, CodeSonar, Checkmarx One and Veracode. See our Coverity vs. Klocwork report.
See our list of best Static Application Security Testing (SAST) vendors.
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