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Check Point CloudGuard WAF vs Contrast Security Assess comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 8, 2024

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

Check Point CloudGuard WAF
Ranking in Application Security Tools
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
55
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (8th)
Contrast Security Assess
Ranking in Application Security Tools
29th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (27th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Application Security Tools category, the mindshare of Check Point CloudGuard WAF is 0.5%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Contrast Security Assess is 1.3%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Security Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Check Point CloudGuard WAF0.5%
Contrast Security Assess1.3%
Other98.2%
Application Security Tools
 

Featured Reviews

MK
CISO at Pink Solutions
Cloud security has strengthened risk posture and improved advanced threat visibility
There are some API gateway and API securities I mentioned. If these are incorporated with AI-related features, particularly those seven key vulnerabilities I mentioned—token theft and tool poisoning—that would be beneficial. AI-related features are not included yet in Check Point CloudGuard WAF. However, they are present in FortiGate. That is the advantage of FortiGate now. FortiGate is stopping all AI-related vulnerabilities now. FortiGate has this capability. It is unfortunate that even Palo Alto also lacks one or two of these features. Check Point Quantum is very good, without a doubt. However, their capabilities are not in comparison with Palo Alto. There are some features, but there are some gaps in comparison with Palo Alto.
ToddMcAlister - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Application and Data Security Engineer at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees
It has an excellent API interface to pull APIs.
Assess has brought our development time down because it helps create code the first time. Instead of going through the Jenkins process to build an application, they can see right off the bat that if there are errors in the code and fix them before it even goes to build.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution offers sophisticated security techniques with unique characteristics that can be particularly valuable for the financial sector, which is where we develop apps."
"The solution preemptively blocks zero-day attacks and detects hidden anomalies effectively."
"The automated policy creation and threat intelligence have helped my team by reducing manual configuration and saving time, and the threat intelligence updates ensure immediate protection against new threats, simplifying daily operations and improving response speed."
"I rate it ten out of ten."
"With the solution, we managed to obtain complete comprehensive visibility of the entire environment in the cloud, thus having better control of each of the resources."
"Machine learning is a valuable tool for this assessment because it allows for a two-phase approach: secure and non-secure."
"Check Point CloudGuard WAF has positively impacted our organization in security and operational efficiency, with a 30-40% drop in malicious traffic and a 15-20% reduction in manual intervention for our SOC team due to reduced false positives and automated protection."
"Support is the same with on-premise devices, and it is very good. Since it is cloud-based, I do not need them as much."
"It is a stable solution...Contrast Security Assess is one of the first players in this market, so they have experience and customers, especially abroad. Overall, it's a good product."
"One of the key takeaways is that in order to have a secure application, you cannot rely on just the pentest, vulnerability assessments, and the periodicity of the reviews; you need the real-time feedback on that, and Contrast Assess offers that."
"In our most critical applications, we have a deep dive in the code evaluation, which was something we usually did with periodic vulnerability assessments, code reviews, etc. Now, we have real time access to it. It's something that has greatly enhanced our code's quality. We have actually embedded a KPI in regards to the improvement of our code shell. For example, Contrast provides a baseline where libraries and the usability of the code are evaluated, and they produce a score. We always aim to improve that score. On a quarterly basis, we have added this to our KPIs."
"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."
"From a percentage perspective, somewhere around 90 percent of the time we used to spend has been given back to our team, because the false positive rate with Contrast is less than 5 percent."
"The accuracy of the solution in identifying vulnerabilities is better than any other product we've used, far and away."
"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."
"Contrast was a very complete solution; it met all of our technical requirements and it was really the only IAST product that felt like a real product."
 

Cons

"I do not know if it is already there, but I would like to have complete visibility between the posture management and firewall as a service."
"The UI interface needs improvement because there are a number of bugs. Integration with the SIEM platform is currently one of the key challenges that need to be addressed."
"The negative side I see is that while most things about Check Point CloudGuard WAF are really good, there is some latency and performance issues, as it can be slow to log in, especially from different regions."
"One of the big problems we found in Check Point, in general, is the support."
"If the price could come down, I would be very happy with the product."
"CloudGuard WAF could improve UI simplicity, reduce false positives, and enhance policy management."
"Pricing and licensing are really expensive for this product. While it provides a very good security level, the price for each service is high."
"At present, we require a lot of customization and additional features to make it usable in our system."
"I would like to see them come up with more scanning rules."
"The solution should provide more details in the section where it shows that third-party libraries have CVEs or some vulnerabilities."
"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'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."
"Regarding the solution's OSS feature, the one drawback that we do have is that it does not have client-side support. We'll be missing identification of libraries like jQuery or JavaScript, and such, that are client-side."
"I would like to see them come up with more scanning rules."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Check Point CloudGuard Application Security's pricing is comparable to other products in the market."
"I find the pricing to be reasonable."
"As Infiniti customers, the pricing is manageable, as we have allowances dedicated to each Check Point product. The price is not as high compared to other options I have dealt with in the past."
"The tool's licensing costs are yearly and competitive."
"Check Point CloudGuard Application Security's pricing is not friendly."
"The sales team or account managers from Check Point are top-notch. As I am using other products as well, my pricing was competitive compared to others."
"Considering all the benefits we've observed, we find the price to be satisfactory."
"It is not cheap, but it is worth it."
"You only get one license for an application. Ours are very big, monolithic applications with millions of lines of code. We were able to apply one license to one monolithic application, which is great. We are happy with the licensing. Pricing-wise, they are industry-standard, which is fine."
"The good news is that the agent itself comes in two different forms: the unlicensed form and the licensed form. Unlicensed gives use of that software composition analysis for free. Thereafter, if you apply a license to that same agent, that's when the instrumentation takes hold. So one of my suggestions is to do what we're doing: Deploy the agent to as many applications as possible, with just the SCA feature turned on with no license applied, and then you can be more choosy and pick which teams will get the license applied."
"The solution is expensive."
"For what it offers, it's a very reasonable cost. The way that it is priced is extremely straightforward. It works on the number of applications that you use, and you license a server. It is something that is extremely fair, because it doesn't take into consideration the number of requests, etc. It is only priced based on the number of onboarded applications. It suits our model as well, because we have huge traffic. Our number of applications is not that large, so the pricing works great for us."
"It's a tiered licensing model. The more you buy, as you cross certain quantity thresholds, the pricing changes. If you have a smaller environment, your licensing costs are going to be different than a larger environment... The licensing is primarily per application. An application can be as many agents as you need. If you've got 10 development servers and 20 production servers and 50 QA servers, all of those agents can be reporting as a single application that utilizes one license."
"The product's pricing is low. I would rate it a two out of ten."
"I like the per-application licensing model... We just license the app and we look at different vulnerabilities on that app and we remediate within the app. It's simpler."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
26%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business36
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise19
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise6
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about CloudGuard for Application Security?
We have not had any incidents. We could realize its benefits immediately. We watched and monitored the traffic, and it was amazing to see the results.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CloudGuard for Application Security?
Check Point CloudGuard WAF is expensive. It is a little bit expensive. You cannot avoid this from an Israeli product. Israeli products follow a certain pricing model. If they could reduce the cost ...
What needs improvement with CloudGuard for Application Security?
There are some API gateway and API securities I mentioned. If these are incorporated with AI-related features, particularly those seven key vulnerabilities I mentioned—token theft and tool poisonin...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

Check Point CloudGuard Application Security, CloudGuard Application Security, CloudGuard AppSec
Contrast Assess
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Orange España, Paschoalotto
Williams-Sonoma, Autodesk, HUAWEI, Chromeriver, RingCentral, Demandware.
Find out what your peers are saying about Check Point CloudGuard WAF vs. Contrast Security Assess and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,444 professionals have used our research since 2012.