Contrast Security Assess vs Defensics Protocol Fuzzing comparison

The compared Contrast Security and Black Duck solutions aren't in the same category. Contrast Security is ranked #27 in SAST , with an average rating of 8.0, and holds a 0.7% mindshare in the category. Black Duck is ranked #4 in FTT , and holds a 20.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Contrast Security users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Black Duck users who would recommend it.

Contrast Security Assess

Read 11 Contrast Security Assess reviews

1,538 Views
800 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Defensics Protocol Fuzzing

Read 4 Defensics Protocol Fuzzing reviews

1,051 Views
116 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Contrast Security Assess

Defensics Protocol Fuzzing

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Contrast Security Assess and Defensics Protocol Fuzzing based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about SonarSource Sàrl, Veracode, Checkmarx and others in Static Application Security Testing (SAST).

To learn more, read our detailed Static Application Security Testing (SAST) Report (Updated: November 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

November 2025

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Helped 879,371 peers since 2012

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

Contrast Security Assess

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Security Tools (29th), Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (27th)

Defensics Protocol Fuzzing

Average Rating

8.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Fuzz Testing Tools (4th)

Mindshare comparison

While both are Quality Assurance solutions, they serve different purposes. Contrast Security Assess is designed for Static Application Security Testing (SAST) and holds a mindshare of 0.7%, up 0.4% compared to last year.
Defensics Protocol Fuzzing, on the other hand, focuses on Fuzz Testing Tools, holds 20.5% mindshare, up 20.5% since last year.

Static Application Security Testing (SAST) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Contrast Security Assess	0.7%
SonarQube	19.8%
Checkmarx One	10.3%
Other	69.2%

Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

Fuzz Testing Tools Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Defensics Protocol Fuzzing	20.5%
PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional	30.1%
GitLab	22.6%
Other	26.799999999999997%

Fuzz Testing Tools

Featured Reviews

reviewer1605099

Director of Threat and Vulnerability Management at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

We're gathering vulnerability data from multiple environments in real time, fundamentally changing how we identify issues in applications

The solution is very accurate in identifying vulnerabilities. In cases where we are performing application assessment using Contrast Assess, and also using legacy application security testing tools, Contrast successfully identifies the same vulnerabilities that the other tools have identified but it also identifies significantly more. In addition, it has visibility into application components that other testing methodologies are unaware of. Assess also provides the option of helping developers incorporate security elements while they're writing code. It depends on whether individual developers decide to utilize the information that's provided to them from the solution, but it definitely gives them visibility into more environments. It gives them an opportunity to remediate vulnerabilities well before production deployments.

Read full review

Sarath Kumar Choday

Senior Technical Lead at HCL Technologies

Product security tests for switches and router sections

Codenomicon Defensics should be more advanced for the testing sector. It should be somewhat easy and flexible to install. What I see in the documentation isn't that. Even if something doesn't malfunction, sometimes it is hard to install and execute. The product needs video documentation. This would help a lot more.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."

"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."

"No other tool does the runtime scanning like Contrast does. Other static analysis tools do static scanning, but Contrast is runtime analysis, when the routes are exercised. That's when the scan happens. This is a tool that has a very unique capability compared to other tools. That's what I like most about Contrast, that it's runtime."

"The accuracy of the solution in identifying vulnerabilities is better than any other product we've used, far and away. In our internal comparisons among different tools, Contrast consistently finds more impactful vulnerabilities, and also identifies vulnerabilities that are nearly guaranteed to be there, meaning that the chance of false positives is very low."

"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."

"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."

"When we access the application, it continuously monitors and detects vulnerabilities."

"We use the Contrast OSS feature that allows us to look at third-party, open-source software libraries, because it has a cool interface where you can look at all the different libraries. It has some really cool additional features where it gives us how many instances in which something has been used... It tells us it has been used 10 times out of 20 workloads, for example. Then we know for sure that OSS is being used."

More Contrast Security Assess pros

"We have found multiple issues in our embedded system network protocols, related to buffer overflow. We have reduced some of these issues."

"The product is related to US usage with TLS contact fees, i.e. how more data center connections will help lower networking costs."

"Whatever the test suit they give, it is intelligent. It will understand the protocol and it will generate the test cases based on the protocol: protocol, message sequence, protocol, message structure... Because of that, we can eliminate a lot of unwanted test cases, so we can execute the tests and complete them very quickly."

Cons

"The product's retesting part needs improvement. The tool also needs improvement in the suggestions provided for fixing vulnerabilities. It relies more on documentation rather than on quick fixes."

"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. They have it in their roadmap to have these agents. If they have that, we will have complete coverage."

"The solution needs to improve flexibility...The scalability of the product is a problem in the solution, especially from a commercial perspective."

"The setup of the solution is different for each application. That's the one thing that has been a challenge for us. The deployment itself is simple, but it's tough to automate because each application is different, so each installation process for Contrast is different."

"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."

"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."

"Personalization of the board and how to make it appealing to an organization is something that could be done on their end. The reports could be adaptable to the customer's preferences."

"The solution should provide more details in the section where it shows that third-party libraries have CVEs or some vulnerabilities."

More Contrast Security Assess cons

"It does not support the complete protocol stack. There are some IoT protocols that are not supported and new protocols that are not supported."

"Sometimes, when we are testing embedded devices, when we trigger the test cases, the target will crash immediately. It is very difficult for us to identify the root cause of the crash because they do not provide sophisticated tools on the target side. They cover only the client-side application... They do not have diagnostic tools for the target side. Rather, they have them but they are very minimal and not very helpful."

"Codenomicon Defensics should be more advanced for the testing sector. It should be somewhat easy and flexible to install."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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 solution is expensive."

"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 product's pricing is low. I would rate it a two out of ten."

"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."

"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."

"Licensing is a bit expensive."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

24%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

10%

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	6

No data available

Comparisons

OpenText Dynamic Application Security Testing vs Contrast Security Assess

Compared 11% of the time

SonarQube vs Contrast Security Assess

Compared 7% of the time

Seeker Interactive vs Contrast Security Assess

Compared 6% of the time

PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional vs Contrast Security Assess

Compared 6% of the time

Digital.ai Application Security vs Contrast Security Assess

Compared 5% of the time

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SonarQube vs Defensics Protocol Fuzzing

Compared 20% of the time

HCL AppScan vs Defensics Protocol Fuzzing

Compared 16% of the time

Ixia BreakingPoint vs Defensics Protocol Fuzzing

Compared 13% of the time

Coverity Static vs Defensics Protocol Fuzzing

Compared 13% of the time

Blue Cedar vs Defensics Protocol Fuzzing

Compared 9% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Contrast Security Assess

December 2025

Download Contrast Security Assess product report

Buyer's Guide

Defensics Protocol Fuzzing vs. PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional

November 2025

Download Defensics Protocol Fuzzing product report

Also Known As

Contrast Assess

Codenomicon Defensics

Overview

Contrast Security is the world’s leading provider of security technology that enables software applications to protect themselves against cyberattacks, heralding the new era of self-protecting software. Contrast's patented deep security instrumentation is the breakthrough technology that enables highly accurate assessment and always-on protection of an entire application portfolio, without disruptive scanning or expensive security experts. Only Contrast has sensors that work actively inside applications to uncover vulnerabilities, prevent data breaches, and secure the entire enterprise from development, to operations, to production.

Contrast Security

Defensics® fuzz testing is a comprehensive, powerful, and automated black box solution that enables organizations to effectively and efficiently discover and remediate security weaknesses in software. By taking a systematic and intelligent approach to negative testing, Defensics allows organizations to ensure software security without compromising on product innovation, increasing time to market, or inflating operational costs.

Black Duck

Sample Customers

Williams-Sonoma, Autodesk, HUAWEI, Chromeriver, RingCentral, Demandware.

Coriant, CERT-FI, Next Generation Networks

Buyer's Guide

Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

November 2025

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