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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) (26th)
GitHub
Ranking in Application Security Tools
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
101
Ranking in other categories
Version Control (2nd), Agile and DevOps Services (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 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 2.0%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Security Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
GitHub2.0%
Contrast Security Assess1.6%
Other96.4%
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 ANADOLU AGENCY
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

"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."
"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."
"I am impressed with the product's identification of alerts and vulnerabilities."
"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."
"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."
"The accuracy of the solution in identifying vulnerabilities is better than any other product we've used, far and away."
"When we access the application, it continuously monitors and detects vulnerabilities."
"The code sharing and updated history are valuable features."
"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."
"This solution definitely feels stable, and I've never had an issue with it."
"GitHub provides the SFH key to protect our passwords and connection."
"Using the solution feels like we are running a massive development team comprising a couple of other employees and me."
"The ease of the planning board feature in GitHub is very valuable."
"The most important feature of GitHub is the maintainability of the versions of the code."
"This is a simple, easy-to-use solution that is fully compatible with Git."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."
"Their level of support and troubleshooting for the product is limited because of how they handle troubleshooting. It's done through a log file that's very cumbersome to work with."
"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."
"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."
"My primary hurdle is that it doesn't support all of the technologies that we use."
"The UI is a little outdated, so that could be improved."
"The GitHub repository needs an upgraded user interface and overall UI improvements."
"Github needs more storage."
"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."
"We want to incorporate management comments within GitHub, making it more like a product management tool. We haven't done that yet. Another change we're considering is migrating from GitHub to Azure DevOps, especially now that Microsoft has introduced it."
"I'd like GitHub to become a more user friendly solution."
"When I was new, I faced challenges with Git commands, such as reversing or deleting mistakes."
"While using the solution when merging two code branches the code becomes a bit messy. This should be improved in the future."
 

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."
"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 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."
"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."
"I haven't had to pay anything for GitHub, I use the free version."
"GitHub is an open-source product, but when using the free-to-use version, anyone can see the code we're working on."
"Regarding pricing, I'd rate it eight out of ten. It's decent and not too expensive, and small businesses can also afford it. With AWS taking CodeCommit out of the market, I don't see many competitors for small companies in terms of 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."
"We are currently paying nothing for GitHub."
"It's cheaper than Bitbucket."
"If I consider the market standards, the product's price is pocket-friendly."
"The licensing model from GitHub is very clear."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Construction Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Marketing Services Firm
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

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 Enterprise54
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for GitHub?
I do not have to deal with pricing because my IT department provides it, and as a student in college, I use the free version.
What needs improvement with GitHub?
I do not see areas needing improvement.
What is your primary use case for GitHub?
I have been using GitHub for the last three years in both my college and current company. I typically use GitHub for code development, pushing and uploading files to GitHub where it provides versio...
 

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: June 2026.
899,052 professionals have used our research since 2012.