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Checkmarx One vs Coverity vs Qualys Web Application Scanning 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:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Static Application Security Testing (SAST) category, the mindshare of Checkmarx One is 9.5%, down from 12.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Coverity is 7.2%, up from 6.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Qualys Web Application Scanning is 2.1%, down from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
 

Featured Reviews

Syed Hasan - PeerSpot reviewer
Partner experiences excellent technical support and seamless initial setup
In my opinion, if we are able to extract or show the report, and because everything is going towards agent tech and GenAI, it would be beneficial if it could get integrated with our code base and do the fix automatically. It could suggest how the code base is written and automatically populate the source code with three different solution options to choose from. This would be really helpful.
Jaile Sebes - PeerSpot reviewer
Resolving critical software issues demands faster implementation and better integration
We use Coverity primarily to find issues such as software bugs and memory leaks, especially in C++ and C# projects. It helps us identify deadlocks, synchronization issues, and product crashes Coverity has been instrumental in resolving product crashes by detecting various issues like deadlocks.…
Kelvin Oladipo - PeerSpot reviewer
User-friendly scanning provides valuable vulnerability insights, but pricing improvements are needed
Qualys Web Application Scanning ( /products/qualys-web-application-scanning-reviews ) is user-friendly, easy to understand, easy to use, and easy to deploy. Credential scanning is very effective because it goes in-depth into the system, crawling the pages, and reporting on vulnerabilities. The product helps by providing options for remediating vulnerabilities it finds, making it really useful.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of Checkmarx is the user interface, it is very easy to use. We do not need to configure anything, we only have to scan to see the results."
"Apart from software scanning, software composition scanning is valuable."
"The most valuable feature is that it actually identifies the different criteria you can set to meet whatever standards you're trying to get your system accredited for."
"Our static operation security has been able to identify more security issues since implementing this solution."
"The SAST component was absolutely 100% stable."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is that its number of false positives is less than the other security application platforms. Its ease of use is another good feature. It also supports most of the languages."
"It shows in-depth code of where actual vulnerabilities are."
"The most valuable feature for me is the Jenkins Plugin."
"Coverity is easy to use and easy to integrate with CI."
"Coverity is easy to set up and has a less lengthy process to find vulnerabilities."
"The solution has helped to increase staff productivity and improved our work significantly by approximately 20 percent."
"The product has deeper scanning capabilities."
"Coverity gives advisory and deviation features, which are some of the parts I liked."
"Coverity is easy to use and easy to integrate with CI."
"Considering the analysis part and the benchmarking process involving the product that my company carried out, the solution is good for finding bugs and violations"
"The most valuable feature is that there were not a whole lot of false positives, at least on the codebases that I looked at."
"Qualys Web Application Scanning is accurate and provides minimal false positives."
"It is a good product for website penetration testing to detect vulnerabilities."
"By using QualysGuard, we are able to finish external scans with assured results in half the time.​"
"​This product is designed for easy scalability and can easily scale up ​without major challenges."
"It is a cloud-based solution, so it is easy to scale."
"It combines both web application vulnerability management and internal vulnerability management on one platform and dashboard. Usually, you have to purchase separate tools."
"​QualysGuard web-based scanner is very useful for performing external penetration and PCI scans from remote locations.​"
"The simplicity of exporting reports and the simplicity and clarity of the reports included with the product are good."
 

Cons

"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."
"I would like to see the tool’s pricing improved."
"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."
"We would like to be able to run scans from our local system, rather than having to always connect to the product server, which is a longer process."
"The product's reporting feature could be better. The feature works well for developers, but reports generated to be shared with external parties are poor, it lacks the details one gets when viewing the results directly from the Checkmarx One platform."
"Some of the descriptions were found to be missing or were not as elaborate as compared to other descriptions. Although, they could be found across various standard sources but it would save a lot of time for developers, if this was fixed."
"They could work to improve the user interface. Right now, it really is lacking."
"Some were valid and some were not applicable for us based on the scenario."
"The tool needs to improve its reporting."
"Right now, the Coverity executable is around 1.2GB to download. If they can reduce it to approximately 600 or 700MB, that would be great. If they decrease the executable, it will be much easier to work in an environment like Docker."
"When I put my code into Coverity for scanning, the code information of the product is in the system. The solution could be improved by providing a SBOM, a software bill of material."
"SCM integration is very poor in Coverity."
"I would like to see integration with popular IDEs, such as Eclipse."
"There should be additional IDE support."
"The price is a concern, and there are a lot of false positives coming through."
"Its price can be improved. Price is always an issue with Synopsys."
"In certain cases, this product does have false positives, which the company should work on."
"The authenticated scanning feature could be improved by adding support for real-time scanning tokens and authorization tokens."
"We receive false positives sometimes when using a solution that could be improved. However, the technical team provides us with the exact explanation why it was giving us that kind of error."
"The area of false positives could be improved. There are quite a number of false positives as compared to other solutions. They could probably fine tune the algorithm to be able to reduce the number of false positives being detected."
"There should be better visibility into the application."
"There should be better visibility into the application."
"The pricing does not seem to be competitive."
"The support could be faster."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is an expensive solution."
"It is not expensive, but sometimes, their pricing model or licensing model is not very clear. There are similar variables, such as projects or developers, and sometimes, it is a little bit confusing."
"We have a subscription license that is on a yearly basis, and it's a pretty competitive solution."
"The solution is costly."
"Be cautious of the one-year subscription date. Once it expires, your price will go up."
"I would rate the solution’s pricing an eight out of ten. The tool’s pricing is higher than others and it is for the license alone."
"It's relatively expensive."
"Before implementing the product I would evaluate if it is really necessary to scan so many different languages and frameworks. If not, I think there must be a cheaper solution for scanning Java-only applications (which are 90% of our applications)."
"It is expensive."
"I would rate the tool's pricing a one out of ten."
"The licensing fees are based on the number of lines of code."
"The price is competitive with other solutions."
"I rate Coverity's price a ten on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive."
"Coverity is quite expensive."
"Offers varying prices for different companies"
"The tool's price is somewhere in the middle. It's neither cheap nor expensive. I would rate the pricing a five out of ten."
"The product has a very good licensing model."
"It is an expensive platform."
"The product is expensive, at least initially, in comparison to other products in this category."
"The cost is $30,000 USD for one year to cover WAS (Web Application Security) and the VM (Virtual Machine) security in a company with 200 employees."
"I rate the software’s pricing a six out of ten."
"Qualys has an IT-based licensing based on a yearly license, which is a good way of handling it. However, in some cases, when we do the PCI scanning, the host will not like the scanning and we lose the IT license. So, this could be improved."
"We normally purchase an annual license."
"We are on an annual license for the solution and the pricing could be more affordable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
Manufacturing Company
32%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Government
4%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What alternatives are there for Fortify WebInspect and Fortify SCA?
I would like to recommend Checkmarx. With Checkmarx, you are able to have an all in one solution for SAST and SCA as ...
What do you like most about Checkmarx?
Compared to the solutions we used previously, Checkmarx has reduced our workload by almost 75%.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Checkmarx?
The pricing is relatively expensive due to the product's quality and performance, but it is worth it.
How would you decide between Coverity and Sonarqube?
We researched Coverity, but in the end, we chose SonarQube. SonarQube is a tool for reviewing code quality and securi...
What do you like most about Coverity?
The solution has improved our code quality and security very well.
What do you like most about Qualys Web Application Scanning?
The vulnerability management feature is a strong one. And also the patch management feature.
What needs improvement with Qualys Web Application Scanning?
I would like it to be cheaper because it is a bit expensive compared to competitors like Tenable Nessus ( /products/t...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Synopsys Static Analysis
Qualys WAS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

YIT, Salesforce, Coca-Cola, SAP, U.S. Army, Liveperson, Playtech Case Study: Liveperson Implements Innovative Secure SDLC
SAP, Mega International, Thales Alenia Space
BskyB, Cartagena, ClearPoint Learning Systems, Connect Group, du, Fortrex Technologies, HBOR, HDI, Highlights for Children, The Lithuanian State Enterprise Centre of Registers, City of Miami Beach, Microsoft, MidlandHR, MSCI Inc., Northern Arizona University, Ofgem, Olympus Europa, PhoneFactor, RTL Nederland, ThousandEyes, VGZ Organisatie B.V.
Find out what your peers are saying about Sonar, Veracode, Checkmarx and others in Static Application Security Testing (SAST). Updated: July 2025.
862,624 professionals have used our research since 2012.