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Contrast Security Assess vs GitHub comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

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
31st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (27th)
GitHub
Ranking in Application Security Tools
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
98
Ranking in other categories
Version Control (2nd), Agile and DevOps Services (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Application Security Tools category, the mindshare of Contrast Security Assess is 1.5%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of GitHub is 1.6%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Security Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
GitHub1.6%
Contrast Security Assess1.5%
Other96.9%
Application Security Tools
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Murathan OK - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Development Manager at a media company with 10,001+ employees
CI/CD workflows have become streamlined and AI support has improved collaborative development
We are using GitHub because it is open-source software, which is the most valuable solution for us. The open source and community support are very good. We are always up-to-date with the community, and integration difficulty is very low. If you integrate any CI/CD solutions on GitHub, it's very easy. We started using GitHub about three months ago with AI integration. For our deployments, some developers can be very shy about asking for descriptions on their commits. We are using AI support for comments and deployment management, which is beautiful. We are not using the GitHub API for automating workflows in our projects. I give GitHub a five-star rating for the review capabilities. I also give GitHub five stars for integration with third-party applications. There is a lot of integration available on GitHub. If you want to integrate something, even if it could be integrated before GitHub, you can make your code and integrate your own in-house applications. It's a very easy and powerful aspect of GitHub.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"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."
"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."
"It has helped us to improve the overall security posture of the company, we are able to address the findings before they have been reported by a third-party, and it has also helped us to gain our customers' trust."
"The time it saves us is on the order of one US-based FTE, a security person at an average pay level, and at a bare minimum Contrast helps us like that resource; it's like having a CISSP guy, in the US, on our payroll."
"By far, the thing that was able to provide value was the immediate response while testing ahead of release, in real-time."
"Overall, the product is strong and improving, support is responsive and effective, and supported integrations work for many customers."
"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 most valuable features are the speed, low latency, and the clear, concise set of commands."
"GitHub is the best tool for source repositories."
"This solution is very easy to use which I like about it, and the capacity to own artifacts and share them with others is another good feature, as you don't have to write all your code from scratch and can use available templates and alter the code according to your needs."
"We can make a private repository."
"The code versioning is excellent, and having a detailed log, including every change made to the code by every developer, is invaluable. It makes it so that if there is a bug or problem in the product channel, we can find exactly where it happened and how to fix it."
"The product's initial setup phase is easy but it is always good to connect with GitHub's team that manages APIs."
"This is a simple, easy-to-use solution that is fully compatible with Git."
"I find GitHub very user friendly."
 

Cons

"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."
"My primary hurdle is that it doesn't support all of the technologies that we use."
"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."
"Regarding the solution's OSS feature, the one drawback that we do have is that it does not have client-side support."
"The solution needs to improve flexibility...The scalability of the product is a problem in the solution, especially from a commercial perspective."
"The out-of-the-box reporting could be improved. We need to write our own APIs to make the reporting more robust."
"The solution should provide more details in the section where it shows that third-party libraries have CVEs or some vulnerabilities."
"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."
"The only thing I see missing in GitHub is that it isn't very user friendly for key personnel who don't have in-depth, technical knowledge. In Jira, there are many functions to upload our test cases, and in GitHub we can only do it manually. There are functions which can be used to upload different files, but that still requires some technical knowledge. A layman cannot do it."
"In complex cases, we have to use the terminal for conflict resolution. If those conflicts could be resolved visually in the editor, that would be much better."
"This solution could be improved by offering crowd sourced support where we could ask questions to other users."
"Though I haven't done much research, GitHub lacks in providing more functions like GitLab."
"The sign in process is a bit difficult."
"GitHub uses basic configuration, but messaging is not clear."
"I faced one or two breakdowns. That said, they lasted only for a few seconds or a minute."
"The storage for this solution could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"The product's pricing is low. I would rate it a two out of ten."
"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 solution is expensive."
"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."
"It is open-source. There is no license for GitHub."
"The tool offers a free program. As you go, you can upgrade from the community version to the professional one. I believe it costs about ten dollars per person, per month."
"The price of this solution is reasonable."
"GitHub is an open-source application. It's free to use."
"I haven't had to pay anything for GitHub, I use the free version."
"There are no licensing fees for the features that we use."
"We have an enterprise licensing agreement, and I am not part of the finance department so I can't say how much it costs."
"You don't have to pay for a license if you are using the free version."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Marketing Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business42
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise52
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for GitHub?
I was paying approximately one hundred dollars annually about a year ago. I am uncertain of the current cost, but GitHub without Copilot is free as far as I know. I am not paying anything for my Gi...
What needs improvement with GitHub?
Security could make GitHub better. OWASP Top Ten security advisors could be integrated on GitHub, and it could provide checks and advice. That would be much better. Additionally, LLM integration on...
What is your primary use case for GitHub?
When discussing my use case, I don't know which vendors we are working with in that area, as it's not my area of responsibility right now. About six months ago, I was promoted to Software Developme...
 

Also Known As

Contrast Assess
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Williams-Sonoma, Autodesk, HUAWEI, Chromeriver, RingCentral, Demandware.
Dominion Enterprises, NASA, Braintree, SAP, CyberAgent
Find out what your peers are saying about Contrast Security Assess vs. GitHub and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
886,664 professionals have used our research since 2012.