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CAST Highlight vs Contrast Security Protect comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

CAST Highlight
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Software Composition Analysis (SCA) (16th)
Contrast Security Protect
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Application Security Tools (36th)
 

Mindshare comparison

CAST Highlight and Contrast Security Protect aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. CAST Highlight is designed for Software Composition Analysis (SCA) and holds a mindshare of 1.3%, up 1.0% compared to last year.
Contrast Security Protect, on the other hand, focuses on Application Security Tools, holds 1.1% mindshare, up 0.5% since last year.
Software Composition Analysis (SCA) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
CAST Highlight1.3%
Snyk11.3%
Black Duck SCA9.0%
Other78.4%
Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
Application Security Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Contrast Security Protect1.1%
SonarQube11.8%
Checkmarx One8.0%
Other79.1%
Application Security Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Nishant Chauhan - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data Engineer at LTM
Automated code insights have improved security checks and made review workflows more consistent
If I talk about improvements for CAST Highlight, I would suggest three things. The first is better understanding or niche understanding. Right now, the intent matching is strong for general topics such as ease of use, but for niche B2B terms such as HIPAA compliance or multi-tenant architecture, it sometimes misses context. Improving the domain-specific models would make highlights more accurate for these verticals. The second improvement is more control over the deduplication logic. CAST Highlight's deduplication is great for avoiding spam, but sometimes we want two similar quotes if they are from very different company sizes, such as SMB versus enterprise perspectives on pricing. A slider to adjust deduplication strictness would help. The third suggestion I would like to give is deeper sentiment and outcome tagging. While it has core sentiment capabilities, it does not tag outcomes automatically. For instance, if a quote mentions saved $50,000 per year, tagging that as cost savings $50,000 would let us build ROI charts instantly instead of reading each quote manually. Regarding user experience, integrations, and reporting, I think there is room to enhance those aspects. Regarding user experience, I would suggest improving user actions in terms of bulk actions and keyboard shortcuts. Day-to-day analysts review 50-plus suggested quotes, and currently it is mostly clicking to approve one by one. Adding bulk approve or reject options and keyboard shortcuts would significantly reduce the time taken. A small UX change can lead to a big speed boost. The second point is integrations when pushing to the CMS and Slack alerts. Right now, we export approved highlights manually from CAST Highlight. If CAST Highlight could push directly to our CMS or send Slack alerts for high-strength quotes that hit trending topics, it would close the loop faster, reducing copy-pasting. The third improvement relates to reporting, specifically custom insight dashboards. The tool displays which topics have the most highlights, but we cannot build custom dashboards yet. For example, showing all security quotes from healthcare companies with more than 1,000 employees over the last 90 days would enable better filtering, and exportable dashboards would streamline quarterly reviews.
ToddMcAlister - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Application and Data Security Engineer at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees
It provides us with more in-depth visibility into ongoing attacks.
I rate Contrast Security Protect eight out of 10. Overall, it's a solid product, but I deduct a couple of points because of the interface and some shortcomings in the reporting. If you have a large enterprise where you're dealing with a lot of servers, then it makes sense not to use the internal MySQL database. You should use something like Oracle or Microsoft SQL, but if you don't have many transactions, the embedded MySQL database works great.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Overall, the accuracy of CAST Highlight has been strong and reliability is consistent for our use case."
"CAST Highlight provides a clear overview of the role portfolio and allows users to assess the overall quality of the environment. Users can see where improvements are needed and follow up on trends of the application."
"We are using CAST Highlight for the location because it's an indicator for us that can differentiate us from the other health insurance company, and we are using the indicator as proof of the quality of service for our application."
"The way it tells you which codebase is more ready for the cloud and which codebase is less ready is very valuable, and it works seamlessly with most languages."
"The most valuable features of CAST Highlight are automation and speed."
"The solution provides agnostic blockers for platforms as well as for containerization."
"It offers good performance."
"CAST Highlight is easy to use and has a good dashboard."
"The solution has excellent real-time capabilities."
"The product gives a few false positives. We get 99 percent true positives."
"The Protect solution allows applications to continue to run, even with known vulnerabilities, but will report or block attempts to exploit the vulnerabilities."
"Protect provides us with more in-depth visibility into ongoing attacks."
"Contrast Security's support is great. They're willing to spend a lot of time on your problem."
 

Cons

"The reports that describe the issues of concern are rather abstract and the issues should be more clearly described to the user."
"Technical support could be better."
"CAST Highlight could improve to allow us to comment and do a deep analysis by ourselves."
"There could be potential improvements or additional features added to CAST Highlight to make it better."
"CAST Highlight is an expensive solution. However, CAST Highlight is less expensive than the CAST AIP, but it remains too expensive and the professional services from CAST are also too expensive."
"There's a bit of a learning curve at the outset."
"The ease of configuration and customization could be improved in CAST Highlight."
"Right now, the intent matching is strong for general topics such as ease of use, but for niche B2B terms such as HIPAA compliance or multi-tenant architecture, it sometimes misses context."
"We're not using it much anymore because we had some performance issues."
"There's room for improvement in the initial setup."
"Contrast Security Protect needs to improve integration."
"Protect's reporting GUI is very basic. To get all statuses from the APIs, we needed to write our own KPI dashboard to provide reports."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"CAST Highlight is an expensive solution. However, CAST Highlight is less expensive than the CAST AIP, but it remains too expensive and the professional services from CAST are also too expensive. The high price is part of the problem with the CAST solutions."
"Basic support is included with the standard licensing feed but it can be upgraded for an additional cost."
"It is a pretty costly tool. A lot of customers are resistant to using it."
"CAST Highlight is an expensive solution."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Government
8%
Educational Organization
6%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
9%
Computer Software Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise6
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CAST Highlight?
The pricing of CAST Highlight was not considered expensive or cheap, and no specific comment was made about the setup cost.
What needs improvement with CAST Highlight?
If I talk about improvements for CAST Highlight, I would suggest three things. The first is better understanding or niche understanding. Right now, the intent matching is strong for general topics ...
What is your primary use case for CAST Highlight?
I have been using CAST Highlight for the last four years. In my company, we use CAST Highlight to perform testing for our code to find vulnerabilities and license risks. We also use CAST Highlight ...
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Also Known As

No data available
Contrast Protect
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Liberty Mutual, Barclays, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, US Army, US Air Force, US Navy, Marsh & McLennan, Ernst & Young, PwC, Boston Consulting Group, Telefonica, Total Energies France, SNCF, Broadridge, Sirius XM
Williams-Sonoma, Autodesk, HUAWEI, Chromeriver, RingCentral, Demandware.
Find out what your peers are saying about Snyk, Veracode, Black Duck and others in Software Composition Analysis (SCA). Updated: August 2026.
909,099 professionals have used our research since 2012.