We performed a comparison between Contrast Security Assess and HCL AppScan 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."This has changed the way that developers are looking at usage of third-party libraries, upfront. It's changing our model of development and our culture of development to ensure that there is more thought being put into the usage of third-party libraries."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"When we access the application, it continuously monitors and detects vulnerabilities."
"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."
"We leverage it as a quality check against code."
"It highlights, with several grades of severity, the types of vulnerabilities, so we can focus on the most severe security vulnerabilities in the code."
"Technical support is helpful."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is Postman."
"It comes with all of the templates that we need. For example, we are a company that is regulated by PCI. In order to be PCI compliant, we have a lot of checks and procedures to which we have to comply."
"We use it as a security testing application."
"The most valuable feature of HCL AppScan is scanning QR codes."
"This is a stable solution."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"I would like to see them come up with more scanning rules."
"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 solution should provide more details in the section where it shows that third-party libraries have CVEs or some vulnerabilities."
"The out-of-the-box reporting could be improved. We need to write our own APIs to make the reporting more robust."
"The dashboard, for AppScan or the Fortified fast tool, which we use needs to be improved."
"The tool should improve its output. Scanning is not a challenge anymore since there are many such tools available in the market. The product needs to focus on how its output is being used by end users. It should be also more user-friendly. One of the major challenges is in the tool's integration with applications that need to be scanned. Sometimes, the scanning is not proper."
"The solution often has a high number of false positives. It's an aspect they really need to improve upon."
"The solution could improve by having a mobile version."
"A desktop version should be added."
"If HCL AppScan is able to alert the clients over email once the scan is complete, it would be great. Right now, HCL AppScan doesn't let me know if the scanning part is finished or not, because of which I have to come back and check mostly."
"The databases for HCL are small and have room for improvement."
"They should have a better UI for dashboards."
Contrast Security Assess is ranked 30th in Application Security Tools with 11 reviews while HCL AppScan is ranked 14th in Application Security Tools with 39 reviews. Contrast Security Assess is rated 8.8, while HCL AppScan 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 HCL AppScan writes " A stable and scalable product useful for application security scanning". Contrast Security Assess is most compared with Veracode, Seeker, Fortify WebInspect, Checkmarx One and OWASP Zap, whereas HCL AppScan is most compared with SonarQube, Veracode, Acunetix, Checkmarx One and Rapid7 InsightAppSec. See our Contrast Security Assess vs. HCL AppScan report.
See our list of best Application Security Tools vendors and best Application Security Testing (AST) vendors.
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