Checkmarx One Reviews

Whenever a web application needs to be moved into production, a static code analysis or source code review must be done. The analyst runs several tools on the web application and collects details. Completing a source code review for a particular application will take around five working days.

Since we moved to Checkmarx, it has reduced the time significantly. Usually, we get the report within a day. It lists all the critical vulnerabilities and provides remediation. We provide suggestions to the customers and the project owners to fix the loopholes immediately so that we can move to production. Sometimes, the life cycle is reduced from five days to one day.

Static code reviews are small projects. Previously, with a team of four analysts, we did two project reviews every month. Since we started using the solution, we could do four projects every week with the same team.

It is very easy for the analyst to have everything in a consolidated single pane of glass. Previously, they ran multiple tools. They used one tool for source code analysis and another for static code review. Then, I manually verified each result. Since we moved to Checkmarx, it has been very easy for the analyst.

The tool gives us a shareable report that can be easily shared with management once the product is done. The solution’s performance and the consolidated information it provides are valuable. The platform is completely on the cloud. There are no scalability or connectivity issues. The platform is stable. It can be accessed from anywhere.

We used open-source tools before. We had to deploy the tools in the customers' environment to establish the connection between the tools and their product application. Since Checkmarx is a SaaS-based platform, we need only the forward connection from Checkmarx to the tool. The tool handles everything else. We just need a single firewall rule to be enabled on the platform to establish the connection.

The deployment is very simple. We need just one rule to forward the web application to Checkmarx. The scanning engine is very good. Compared to the solutions we used previously, Checkmarx has reduced our workload by almost 75%. The tool has greatly reduced the time and effort our analysts need to do their tasks. It's very useful if we need to perform a short-term project. It is greatly helpful in fixing loopholes and vulnerabilities swiftly.

We can run only one project at a time. We haven't tested multiple projects at the same time. Currently, not all the projects are visible under one pane. We handle one-time projects. As a manager, I do not have the overall visibility of all projects simultaneously. I have already raised a support ticket requesting the ability to manage all projects from a single pane. There may be an option for it. However, I am not aware of it. The solution must provide more integration with different platforms.

I have been using the solution for three months.

I rate the tool's stability an eight out of ten.

The tool is scalable since it is a cloud-based solution. We have served over 100 customers.

The setup is straightforward. Our analysts had a training for half a day. They were able to use the product form the next day. We just need to purchase a license. Since it is a SaaS-based solution, no additional deployment is required. We only need to enable the firewall rule.

The solution helps us push the application into production much sooner than anticipated. If we have a web application that needs to go live, traditionally, it takes 15 days to a month to push it into production after all the security checks. If the other teams can patch the vulnerabilities as soon as we suggest them, Checkmarx can help us push the product into production within a week. It's very easy to rescan.

If someone has too many applications, they can directly integrate Checkmarx into the CI/CD pipeline. We got the license and are running the solution for our customers. We do not charge our customers for the solution. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

One use case is when a development team finishes, or even in the middle of, development. They run Checkmarx, which shows potential vulnerabilities. If they don't understand something, they consult with me. 

I explain what Checkmarx is highlighting, why it's "shouting" as we say, the specific vulnerability, and the problem it found in the code. Then, together, we explore the code and decide if it's a valid issue requiring a fix. 

We also discuss how to fix it, or if it's a false positive because, in their environment, the problem either cannot exist or doesn't exist in the way they use their software.

We also have another use case. When a software company, like an integration company, does a project for us, we request them to run their code through Checkmarx. If they don't have their own tool, we run it on our Checkmarx and provide them with the report. We request, or rather insist, that they fix most, if not all, of the problems Checkmarx finds. 

These might be issues they didn't consider, but we put it in the contract that they have to submit their software to a "code check," meaning they can use Checkmarx or another approved tool. If they don't have a tool or refuse, then it's okay. The key is to have it in the contract and signed. 

Otherwise, fixing the software later becomes difficult, especially when the project is nearing completion. That's why we do it when the integration begins, so there's still time to address the issues. If you wait until the very end, it's too late.

The solution improved the efficiency of our code security reviews. It helps tremendously because it finds hundreds of potential problems sometimes. When the development teams fix them, or even some of them, it significantly enhances the security of the software. 

For example, we had a project, an outsourced one, that provided code written in PHP and included dozens of open-source utilities, libraries, and the like. Their server-side code was in PHP, and their client-side was in JavaScript. Both sides also used many libraries and utilities.

When we ran Checkmarx, it found numerous problems in both their code and the third-party software, including hundreds of high- and medium-severity issues in the PHP code. I didn't dig into the specifics; I just said, "Look, it found hundreds of high and medium problems. You need to reduce them. Before testing starts, you need to provide us the code again, and we'll run it again."

They started fixing it, and while I didn't follow up on the specific fixes, perhaps they removed some libraries. As long as the number of high and medium problems in the Checkmarx report decreased, it meant they were making progress. They hadn't finished yet, though.

After they fixed about half of the problems, we allowed them to start integration. However, they still need to fix the remaining issues, and hopefully, they will.

The most valuable feature is that Checkmarx specifies the exact line of code where it finds the problem. They show it in the report, the exact line or two lines. They also show where the problem starts and where it's used. 

Even if it's used later in routines or messages during the computation, they show both sides. For example, they show the user input and where it's being used, even if it's saved in a different file. 

They follow the code, the function code, the method code, and all the calls until it's used because they have all the code mapped. So, they show where it starts, where it's being used, and they say it hasn't been checked all the way. They prove it, not just say it, by showing exactly where the issue is. 

Even if you don't know the software, like third-party software you want to fix or modify, you know where to start looking in the code.

As for the UI, it's okay. You give it the code, it runs, and it's pretty good.

There's one thing Checkmarx can maybe fix, actually two things.

First, when we first ran it on a big project, there wasn't enough memory on the computer. It originally ran with eight gigabytes, and now it runs with 32. The software stopped at some point, and while I don't think it said it ran out of memory, it just said "stopped" and something else. 

We had to go to the logs and send them to the integrator, and eventually, they found a memory issue in the logs and recommended increasing the memory. We doubled it once, and it didn't seem enough. We doubled it again, and it helped.

So, even if the software reaches capacity on the computer, even though it writes it in the logs, it should also give an indication in the GUI to the person running it, saying "not enough memory" or "not enough disk space."

Another problem is that when it's scanning and it has an internal problem, for example, it cannot check something, or an internal bug or internal problem, it's being found in the logs, but there's no indication to the user. Now, this is good for them because the user runs it, gets a report, everything's fine.

But in a way, it's not good for them because the user doesn't know there's a problem since they don't check the logs. Because mostly, only the manager looks at the logs and only if there's a problem being reported. You run a process, get a report, but in the logs, there might be an indication that it couldn't check several files or understand something. There's a problem, an internal problem that can be fixed, but nobody knows about it because we don't look at the code. The user doesn't look at the logs; only the business manager does, but they don't know because the user doesn't report it, because the user doesn't know.

So, my suggestion for them is this: if they have problems, they should say, 'Here is the report,' but also indicate to the user somewhere, perhaps in the GUI, not necessarily in the report itself, 'We found 100 problems while looking at your code. Please provide us the logs so we can try to fix those.' Then they can ask if the user has any problems. This way, users would know to send them their logs, and they could improve their software, meaning fix the problems.

Now, they may not want to do this because they'll get flooded with millions of responses and millions of problems from all over the world. They would have to fix them, and people might get angry, asking why they provided a report when there were hidden problems. People might say, 'How come you gave me a report with seven or eight problems when analyzing it, there were internal problems with your code? So it's not a perfect report.'"

So, these internal issues are logged but not communicated to the user through the Checkmarx interface (GUI) or report.

The solution also has a few false positives. So, if they had an easier way for users to send an email directly, instead of just opening a ticket. Because when we open a ticket, they want all the logs and everything, and it becomes a hassle.

Perhaps they could implement an easier system where users can send a snippet of the code, along with an explanation of why they believe it's a false positive, referencing the specific report. 

This way, Checkmarx could analyze the information and the development team could potentially fix the product in those areas. It wouldn't require them to necessarily respond to the user, but I'm not sure if that's feasible for most companies. 

I have been using it for one year. 

If you have enough memory, it's scalable. You need a lot of memory for it to be scalable. 

Once you have enough memory, it is stable and scalable, and there are one or two parameters you can modify to make it even more scalable. Scalability is relatively fine.

For the scanning option, the default is to use only one main language, but you can request multiple languages. It's scalable.

Nowadays, nearly all the developers, when they finish development, either they or the team leader runs it, and they have to fix the problems.

The customer service and support are okay because the thing is, we spoke with the integrator, so we didn't reach Checkmarx tech support.

Positive

The setup was done by an integration company. 

I would definitely recommend it. It's an excellent solution.  

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten because there is always room for improvement. 

Checkmarx could perhaps give more examples of solutions in the reports. It's very good, but sometimes the solutions they give are not necessarily relevant to the code or how it's written. 

So, Checkmarx should give more examples of solutions. Although, it's not that bad because they give a few, one or two. And if you want more, you can look online. But it would help if they could refine it and give additional options for solutions.

It is used for scanning for some other purposes. We needed Checkmarx to figure out some OS top ten issues in the codec.

The only thing I like is that Checkmarx does not need to compile. That's a good feature.

Checkmarx is not good because it has too many false positive issues. The software does not understand the code very well. It does not handle the process very well and misunderstands the logic, resulting in too many false positives. As per my experience, more than 80% of the issues are false positives, and it takes too much time to figure out which ones are true and which ones are false positives. 

Therefore, this is one of the areas of improvement for Checkmarx. It requires in-depth knowledge of the coding. 

I have been using Checkmarx for more than a year. We are using the latest version. 

I would rate it as four because the scanning engine can crash sometimes.

I would rate scalability a three out of ten. 

The technical support is not good because they charge an extra fee. If we pay them on a call basis, they will charge extra. We can only give them emails; if we have a problem, it takes over half a year to fix the issue. They're just too slow.

Neutral

The deployment is easy, but it may take around half an hour or even more because the software is huge. Also, good hardware performance is required, such as big memory and disk space.

It requires a lot of disk space and good hardware performance, and the speed is slow.

The deployment is pretty tough to do by myself.

It's expensive. I would give it a four out of ten.

We just calculated the speed of Checkmarx; it is around 40 lines of code per second. It's too slow, so we now use a Chinese software called XCheck, which is much better. It can scan around 2,000 or 5,000 lines per second, depending on the code complexity. XCheck is a product of a Chinese company called Tencent.

Overall, I would rate the solution a three out of ten. 

The best thing about Checkmarx is the amount of vulnerabilities that it can find compared to other free tools.

The statistics module has a function that allows you to show some statistics, but I think it's limited. Maybe it needs more information. There are some cases where you have to go directly to the Checkmarx database to get the information that you want. The default module that provides statistics is basic, and you need more elaborate information to do vulnerability management. The tool has a limited scope.

It is easy to scale, you just have to pay. There are about 100 developers and security people using this solution in my company. 

The contract that we have is not directly with Checkmarx. It's with an intermediary company in Argentina, and they give us support. They are not very fast in answering our questions. They have a kind of first level support, but for more technical stuff they go directly to Checkmarx.

As with other tools, if you want more, you have to pay more. You have to pay for additional modules or functionalities. For instance, if you want to do some scanning to external dependencies of the software, you have to buy another tool provided by Checkmarx.

You have to pay for licenses for the number of projects that you want to scan and the number of users. I think you have to pay licenses for three features: the number of users, the projects, and I don't remember the other one.

We have two administrators who coordinate maintenance with the vendor.

My advice is that you need to estimate the right amount of licenses. That's very important because right now, our company needs more licenses, and that was not well estimated at the beginning. The other thing is to be clear about the features of this tool that you want or need.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of ten. 

We primarily use Checkmarx for application security and tracking.

The most valuable feature is the application tracking reporting.

From the user's perspective, the interface is pretty good. It will point out the exact line of code when an issue is found.

It is good in terms of coverage for different languages.

It is updated automatically so there is less maintenance.

The cost per user is high and should be reduced. Five years ago, it was a user-based model, which was significantly better. It would be great if we could distribute the cost equally between projects.

I have been working with Checkmarx for about two years.

This is a stable product.

It is scalable in terms of being able to run multiple instances for different products. We have approximately 10 users, which is the size of our application security team.

I would like to increase our usage of this product, but it will ultimately depend on the company's strategy.

Given the stability of Checmarx, it doesn't require a lot of communication with technical support. That said, we have been in touch with them for non-technical issues and they have a good team with a lot of Russian speakers.

Prior to using Checkmarx, I used AppScan but the concept is completely different. With Checkmarx, you are working with source code, whereas as with AppScan, you are working with binaries. You can say that AppScan is more like a dynamic security scan and Checkmarx is more static.

These products are quite different in terms of how you do the testing. Checkmarx is better from both a performance perspective and reporting a lower number of false positives.

We did not have any trouble with the initial setup. Our deployment was done within a couple of hours. The easiest thing to do is create a virtual machine and deploy it.

Our in-house IT staff was responsible for the implementation.

The number of users and coverage for languages will have an impact on the cost of the license. We would like to deploy it for the whole company but it's a question of spending thousands of dollars. Investing $200,000 or $300,000 would be an upper management decision.

The educational component is additional and costs approximately $100 per month for each user. This is too high so we did not agree to the service.

Overall, we are very satisfied with Checkmarx and it is a product that I recommend.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I am using it for software assurance focused on security. I am using its latest version.

I use both the static code analysis and the open-source analysis engine. It gives visibility into weaknesses and the software that may be there in the source code and static analysis. It also gives some insights into the open source vulnerabilities that may be there in the codebase.

I like that you don't have to compile the code in order to execute static code analysis. So, it's very handy. Typically when using SCA tools on C/C++ and C# you must compile the software for SCA to work. CX doesn’t require any compilation due to the way the tool does synthetic compilation to help find errors in code. Many times 3rd party assurance providers don’t have all the files to compile so CX comes in handy. 

They should make it more container-friendly and optimized for the CI pipeline. They should make it a little less heavy. Right now, it requires a SQL database, and the way the tool works is that it has an engine and then it has an analysis database in which it stores the information. So, it is pretty heavy from that perspective because you have to have a full SQL Server. They're working on something called Checkmarx Light, which is a slim-down version. They haven't released it yet, but that's what we need. There should be something a little more slimmed down that can just run the analysis and output the results in a format that's readable as opposed to having a full, really big, and thick deployment with a full database server.

I had several issues with the installation. It should just work out of the box.

I have been using it off and on for about a year.

I've run into a few bugs here and there but i would recommend installing on virtual machine and snapshoting a working install. 

My setup is standalone. They do have a scalable version, but it's not something I need.

We're not using it a lot. Its usage is once a month. The way our organization works is that we don't do static code analysis every day. It's more on an as-needed basis. So, it's no fault of the Checkmarx tool. It's just not something that we've been working on.

They were pretty good. I would rate them a four out of five, but I was using their salespeople. It wasn't their traditional tech support, so I can't really evaluate their traditional tech support. When they're selling something, they give you a lot more service instead of having to go through the support system.

I still use other tools, so I just added it to the tool chest. I have Fortify, CodeSonar, etc  and I added Checkmarx as a different tool.

I installed it. It's straightforward to install, but I had several issues with the installation. I don't know if it was with my environment or not. If it works properly, it's a simple install, but in my example, it did not work right off the bat. There was some troubleshooting that had to go on, which was a little frustrating.

It took weeks. It required back and forth communication with support for a couple of days, but I wasn't actively working on it for days. I would run into a bug, send the log file, and go back and forth. It wasn't anything crazy, but it was a little frustrating. It should just work out of the box. It should be pretty straightforward where you just click the installer and go, but it wasn't.

It was implemented in-house, and then I had to call support when needed.

In terms of maintenance, it is pretty self-sustaining. You update it whenever it needs to be updated.

There hasn't been much return yet because we haven't used it much, but I have enough faith in it that I committed to it for multiple years. We are starting to use it more but not enough to state ROI yet

I would rate it a seven out of ten. It's not the best tool on the market, but it provides some good capability for what it is.

Checkmarx is used to check the code from programmers and vulnerabilities in third-party software.

Checkmarx can be deployed on the cloud and on-premise. However, it depends on the version.

Checkmarx detected code sections that did not adhere to best practices. After being informed, the programmers were able to rectify some of the issues. Without Checkmarx, it is unlikely we would have identified these issues.

Utilizing the SCA module, I gained valuable insights into the vulnerabilities present in open-source Python libraries that individuals desire to use. As an information security consultant, I advise against employing Python libraries that contain known vulnerabilities. The SCA solution proved to be helpful in this regard.

The most valuable features of Checkmarx are the SCA module and the code-checking module. Additionally, the solutions are explanatory and helpful.

Checkmarx could improve the solution reports and false positives. The false positives could be reduced. For example, we have alerts that are tagged as vulnerabilities but when you drill down they are not. 

In a future release, the SCA module could have better documentation. It was difficult to know how to check the names of all the modules. It took me a lot of time and I needed help to be able to write the requirements file. More clarification would be helpful in the documentation, such as examples.

I have been using Checkmarx for approximately six months.

The stability is great.

I rate the stability of Checkmarx a ten out of ten.

The scalability of the solution is great. Everything I send to the solution is processed quickly.

We have five information security analysts and programmers using this solution.

We plan to increase our usage. We will install it on more networks.

I rate the scalability of Checkmarx a ten out of ten.

I found someone in the evening that logged in and answered my issues. They are responsive.

I rate the support of Checkmarx a ten out of ten.

Positive

We have one person for the maintenance of the solution but it is minimal and is not a full-time job.

I would advise others to ask for a demo of the solution and if it works well for their use case then purchase it.

I rate Checkmarx a nine out of ten.

We primarily use Checkmarx for assessing vulnerabilities in applications.

What I like best about Checkmarx is that it has fewer false positives than other products, giving you better results.

One area for improvement in Checkmarx is pricing, as it's more expensive than other products.

I've used Checkmarx for four to five years.

Regarding Checkmarx stability, it's an eight out of ten.

Checkmarx is a scalable tool and much better scalability-wise than other products I used. I'm rating its scalability as eight out of ten.

We never had to contact the Checkmarx technical support team.

I was not involved in the initial setup for Checkmarx.

Checkmarx is comparatively costlier than other products, which is why some of the customers feel reluctant to go for it, though performance-wise, Checkmarx can compete with other products.

My company is in the service business, so it provides services to customers. For example, the customer uses SonarQube, so my company uses the same tool to execute vulnerability assessments.

I've worked on Checkmarx, NetSuite, Acunetix, and other application security tools used by customers.

My rating for Checkmarx is eight out of ten because it's a good product, and its only con is the cost, which is high for some customers.

I recommend Checkmarx to others because of its performance. The tool has better intelligent outcomes, and Checkmarx has better automation internally.

My company is a Checkmarx customer.