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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
32nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (26th)
GitHub
Ranking in Application Security Tools
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
99
Ranking in other categories
Version Control (2nd), Agile and DevOps Services (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Application Security Tools category, the mindshare of Contrast Security Assess is 1.6%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of GitHub is 1.9%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Security Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
GitHub1.9%
Contrast Security Assess1.6%
Other96.5%
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

"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."
"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 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."
"Overall, the product is strong and improving, support is responsive and effective, and supported integrations work for many customers."
"The accuracy of the solution in identifying vulnerabilities is better than any other product we've used, far and away."
"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."
"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 control is the most valuable feature as developers can work on a single code."
"Any complex banking can be handled very easily in GitHub. It allows us to integrate with tools like Grid, where we can merge and resolve conflicts without any hassle."
"The ease of the planning board feature in GitHub is very valuable."
"The most valuable features are GitHub are the standard features, they are very useful."
"We use GitHub instead of our regular shared drive. It offers instant access to shared folders as well as good security."
"GitHub is good for collaboration because everyone can access it or we can restrict access to a few users. If I upload a file and share the URL, it's not restricted to a set number of users. Everyone with the link can download the files."
"The most valuable features are the speed, low latency, and the clear, concise set of commands."
"The most valuable features are GitHub Actions for triggering workflows, GitHub Secrets for saving credentials without needing a third-party service, and the UI for identifying errors in the code when we commit."
 

Cons

"My primary hurdle is that it doesn't support all of the technologies that we use."
"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."
"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."
"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 would like to see them come up with more scanning rules."
"The out-of-the-box reporting could be improved. We need to write our own APIs to make the reporting more robust."
"We face issues with synchronization while working with teams."
"This solution is somewhat stable, but requires additional supporting products."
"They're improving the work items to track the progress of the team, but in my experience, Azure DevOps is better in this functionality. GitHub needs to improve the form to track the progress of the work done by a team."
"It would be useful to have tutorial videos within the GitHub dashboard."
"The ticketing system is not working."
"The security for this solution could be tightened up and improved."
"One area for improvement in GitHub could be integration with other tools, such as test management or project management tools."
"GitHub could automate the setup process more, such as creating YAML files for GitHub Actions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 solution is expensive."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 basic licensing model is free, and if you need to have technical support and such things, then it does cost something. You only need to pay extra if you need technical support."
"GitHub is an open-source product, but when using the free-to-use version, anyone can see the code we're working on."
"GitHub is a cost-effective solution."
"We are currently paying nothing for GitHub."
"I use the free version of GitHub."
"The product is reasonably priced."
"It’s an open-source solution."
"My company purchased it. Before, we used to receive the free version, but then they purchased some of the features."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Marketing Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
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 Enterprise15
Large Enterprise52
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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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?
We have been working on artificial intelligence improvements as well, and improvement of that, so the development and delivery to different kinds of environments will be faster. I think that a slig...
What is your primary use case for GitHub?
We are using products that are already established, as we are a consultant company that is working extensively on Microsoft technologies. For the queuing products, we are using Service Bus, Event H...
 

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.
892,776 professionals have used our research since 2012.