CAST Highlight Reviews

We are using it for a customer to help review the architecture of the different applications and understand how to replatform them.

We use it for our customers. Too early to say how customer has benefited.

The way it tells you which codebase is more ready for the cloud and which codebase is less ready is very valuable. It works seamlessly with most languages.

Its price should be better. It is a pretty costly tool.

They have two products: CAST Highlight and CAST AIP. Both are licensed separately. As per CAST, Highlight is for RAPID prototyping and AIP is for in depth detailed analysis. But then there are areas which Highlights covers (Cloud Adoption) which AIP does not. Our experience in using AIP is that it also does not look at entire tech stack and does not provide the list of all technologies present in your application and then flag what is supported and what is not so that customer has clear view. Highlight probably does that. They need to simplify it for customers. I would expect CAST Highlight to have lighter version of the Health dashboard and the Engineering dashboards . These dashboards are currently a part of CAST AIP, and if these are made available in CAST Highlight, customers won't have to use two different products all the time.

I have been using this solution for one and a half to two months.

It is stable. It works seamlessly with most languages. However, when the application code is pretty complex, such as .NET with entity framework, it probably does not check the integrity of the application.

It is pretty good in terms of scalability.

Their technical team is pretty helpful. They provide excellent support.

CAST Highlight is easy to install. Other products of CAST, such as CAST AIP, can be a little complex.

We have leveraged CAST SMEs and they provide excellent support and have great indepth knowledge of the product

Too early to say as we have just started.

It is a pretty costly tool. A lot of customers are resistant to using it.

We evaluated a lot of tools, but for this particular use case, we couldn't find any tool that matches CAST Highlight.

I would advise others to really do their homework and understand the use case and how CAST Highlight is going to help them. Otherwise, they will only be spending money, and they may not really see its value. 

It is a pretty strong engineering tool, but unless you are really clear about the use case and the outcomes, you will not get a value out of it. If you do not know the outcomes and what do you want to do with the tool, you will get the dashboards or output, but you won't be able to consume and benefit from it. For example, a fantastic use case is when you know for sure that a customer is looking to migrate ten applications from on-prem to cloud and wants to know how much code is ready for moving to the cloud versus how much refactoring they need to do. If you're looking for a code change estimate from on-prem to on-prem or some other application, CAST Highlight may not be a good tool for such a use case.

I would rate CAST Highlight an eight out of ten.

We are a solution provider and we used CAST Highlight in a project, last year, for one of our clients. 

CAST Highlight is easy to use and has a good dashboard.

This solution integrates well with Azure DevOps and you can import the dashboard into that environment.

The level of abstraction is a little bit high compared to other solutions, such as Veracode.

The reports that describe the issues of concern are rather abstract and the issues should be more clearly described to the user. Reducing this type of technical debt would help to manage policy such that it was easier to create and submit for approval. Essentially, it does not provide enough help for the developers.

We used CAST Highlight for about one year.

The software is stable. It was used on a daily basis during this project. There were often seven builds competed each day that reports were generated for.

I have not seen any issues related to scalability, although we were not using a great deal of code. It was quite possibly only three or four repositories that we were scanning, which means that we did not really test the scalability.

We only had six or seven people in our DevOps team for this project.

We did not have to contact technical support.

I have also used Veracode and I like it much better. Veracode is easier for developers to work with. I have also worked with SonarQube.

The integration with Azure DevOps means that there are things you can do in CAST Highlight that you cannot do using other solutions.

It is easy to set up and get started.

Our in-house team handled the deployment. It took a couple of days to deploy and learn how to use it.

Basic support is included with the standard licensing fee but it can be upgraded for an additional cost.

In general, this solution is easy to set up, easy to get started, easy to use, and easy to integrate, but the usability is not as high as that of Veracode. It would be great if it were more developer-friendly and it provided more information on how to resolve the problems that it discovers. I have seen other tools that do a better job of providing reports and guidance to the developers.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.