Contrast Security Assess vs Fortify Application Defender comparison

Contrast Security and OpenText are both solutions in the Application Security Tools category. Contrast Security is ranked #29, while OpenText is ranked #24 with an average rating of 8.0. Contrast Security holds a 1.3% mindshare in AS, compared to OpenText’s 1.2% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Contrast Security users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 81% of OpenText users who would recommend it.

Contrast Security Assess

Read 11 Contrast Security Assess reviews

2,206 Views
1,478 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Fortify Application Defender

Read 11 Fortify Application Defender reviews

1,665 Views
1,382 Comparison Views

81% willing to recommend

Contrast Security Assess

Fortify Application Defender

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 8, 2024

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Contrast Security Assess and Fortify Application Defender compete in the application security solutions category. Users tend to prefer Fortify Application Defender due to its comprehensive feature set and advanced analytics, despite Contrast Security Assess receiving favorable reviews for pricing and support.

Features: Contrast Security Assess is known for real-time vulnerability detection, seamless CI/CD integration, and competitive setup costs. Fortify Application Defender offers a wide security rule set, advanced analytics capabilities, and extensive security coverage, resulting in users generally finding its features more comprehensive.

Room for Improvement: Contrast Security Assess could benefit from enhancements in scalability, support for legacy systems, and adaptability. Fortify Application Defender users suggest improvements in the configuration process, lowering system resource usage, and enhancing usability. Both products exhibit distinct areas requiring attention based on user feedback.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Contrast Security Assess is praised for its straightforward deployment and responsive support. Fortify Application Defender, despite offering a detailed setup guide, requires more configuration time. Both products maintain high customer service ratings, with users experiencing faster deployment times with Contrast Security Assess.

Pricing and ROI: Contrast Security Assess stands out with favorable ROI and competitive pricing. In contrast, Fortify Application Defender users acknowledge higher initial costs but justify them with solid ROI due to comprehensive coverage. Pricing perception varies as Fortify Application Defender is viewed as a premium option.

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To learn more, read our detailed Contrast Security Assess vs. Fortify Application Defender Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Contrast Security Assess vs. Fortify Application Defender

March 2026

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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

Ranking in Application Security Tools

29th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (27th)

Fortify Application Defender

Ranking in Application Security Tools

24th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Application Security Tools category, the mindshare of Contrast Security Assess is 1.3%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fortify Application Defender is 1.2%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Security Tools Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Fortify Application Defender	1.2%
Contrast Security Assess	1.3%
Other	97.5%

Application Security 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

VinothSivam

CTO at Abcl

Useful for fast code review in devOps pipelines

I rate the tool's scalability a seven out of ten. However, I'm concerned about how it handles an increasing number of lines of code. As the complexity grows, so does the time it takes for the tool to review everything. I want more clarity on how Fortify Application Defender handles multiple threats. We have numerous endpoints, but the tool runs in our pipeline, meaning it operates in the cloud. All our code is configured there, and the tool runs integration testing, unit testing, user testing, and final production code tests. It's a day-to-day experience. It's utilized almost every day as part of our pipeline runs. Each team responsible for integration testing, human testing, user access testing, and preproduction testing runs it whenever they take a build.

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

"I am impressed with the product's identification of alerts and 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."

"Assess has an excellent API interface to pull APIs."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

More Contrast Security Assess pros

"Fortify Application Defender's most valuable features are machine learning algorithms, real-time remediation, and automatic vulnerability notifications."

"We are able to provide out customers with a secure application after development. They are no longer left wondering if they are vulnerable to different threats within the market following deployment."

"The solution helped us to improve the code quality of our organization."

"Its ability to find security defects is valuable."

"The product saves us cost and time."

"The most valuable feature is that it analyzes data in real-time."

"The tool's most valuable feature is software composition analysis. This feature works well with my .NET applications, providing a better understanding of library vulnerabilities."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to automatically feed it rules what it's coupled with the WebInspect dynamic application scanning technology."

More Fortify Application Defender pros

Cons

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

"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."

"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."

"I would like to see them come up with more scanning rules."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The out-of-the-box reporting could be improved. We need to write our own APIs to make the reporting more robust."

More Contrast Security Assess cons

"I encountered many false positives for Python applications."

"The product should integrate industry-standard code review tools internally with its system. This would streamline the coding process, as developers wouldn't need multiple tools for code review and security checks. Many independent and open-source tools are available, from Apache to various libraries. Using multiple DevOps pipeline tools can slow the turnaround time."

"The solution could improve the time it takes to scan. When comparing it to SonarQube it does it in minutes while in Fortify Application Defender it can take hours."

"Fortify Application Defender could improve by supporting more code languages, such as GRAAS and Groovy."

"The workbench is a little bit complex when you first start using it."

"The biggest complaint that I have heard concerns additional platform support because right now, it only supports applications that are written in .NET and Java."

"Support for older compilers/IDEs is lacking."

"Fortify Application Defender gives a lot of false positives."

More Fortify Application Defender cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"I rate the solution's pricing a five out of ten. It comes as an annual cloud subscription. The tool's pricing is around 50 lakhs."

"The base licensing costs for the SaaS platform is about $900 USD per application, per year."

"Fortify Application Defender is very expensive."

"The licensing is very complex, it's project based and can range from $10,000 to $200,000+ depending on the project type and size."

"The price of this solution could be less expensive."

"The product’s price is much higher than other tools."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

20%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	8

Questions from the Community

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

What do you like most about Fortify Application Defender?

I find the configuration of rules in Fortify Application Defender useful. Its integration is also easy.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Fortify Application Defender?

The product should integrate industry-standard code review tools internally with its system. This would streamline the coding process, as developers wouldn't need multiple tools for code review and...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Fortify Application Defender?

We use the solution for fast code review. It is integrated into our DevOps pipeline.

See all answers

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Compared 11% of the time

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Compared 11% of the time

Veracode vs Fortify Application Defender

Compared 6% of the time

Klocwork vs Fortify Application Defender

Compared 4% of the time

CAST Application Intelligence Platform vs Fortify Application Defender

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Contrast Security Assess

March 2026

Download Contrast Security Assess product report

Buyer's Guide

Application Security Tools

February 2026

Download Fortify Application Defender product report

Also Known As

Contrast Assess

HPE Fortify Application Defender, Micro Focus Fortify Application Defender

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

Micro Focus Security Fortify Application Defender is a runtime application self-protection (RASP) solution that helps you manage and mitigate risk from homegrown or third-party applications. It provides centralized visibility into application use and abuse while protecting from software vulnerability exploits and other violations in real time.

OpenText

Sample Customers

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

ServiceMaster, Saltworks, SAP

Buyer's Guide

Contrast Security Assess vs. Fortify Application Defender

March 2026

Free Report: Contrast Security Assess vs. Fortify Application Defender

Find out what your peers are saying about Contrast Security Assess vs. Fortify Application Defender and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.

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