No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

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
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
101
Ranking in other categories
Version Control (2nd), Agile and DevOps Services (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of 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 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

"Overall, the product is strong and improving, support is responsive and effective, and supported integrations work for many customers."
"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."
"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."
"The accuracy of the solution in identifying vulnerabilities is better than any other product we've used, far and away."
"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."
"I am impressed with the product's identification of alerts and vulnerabilities."
"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."
"Assess has brought our development time down because it helps create code the first time."
"A great feature is being able to have different repositories and different kinds of projects in a single solution at a single time. It's just a click away."
"If you're looking for storing files and code, GitHub is the best and most secure solution."
"It is very helpful, time saving, and user-friendly."
"The ability to track external changes to repositories we are using has been very useful for us."
"The most valuable aspects of GitHub are version control and parallel development. I also appreciate the forking part, which allows us to release a specific set of features to the environment."
"GitHub's merging feature is much better than that of other products because merging is done daily."
"GitHub's version control is valuable."
"If you want to share documents, you can create articles and diagrams with GitHub and share."
 

Cons

"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."
"The out-of-the-box reporting could be improved. We need to write our own APIs to make the reporting more robust."
"I would like to see them come up with more scanning rules."
"Personalization of the board and how to make it appealing to an organization is something that could be done on their end."
"The solution should provide more details in the section where it shows that third-party libraries have CVEs or some vulnerabilities."
"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."
"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."
"GitHub's issue management could be improved a little from an organization standpoint. It would be helpful to have the ability to organize a work board or a backlog more comprehensively. For organizations migrating to GitHub from arbitrary systems, it's a little bit of a headache to move on to that system."
"The sign in process is a bit difficult."
"It would be beneficial if GitHub provided some security scanning for new libraries to ensure that there are no viruses in it."
"I would like a more graphical, user-friendly UI, to avoid writing so much code on cmd."
"GitHub could add more security features. I am not sure how secure it is. If they provide more security features, then it can be used in more official applications."
"This solution could be improved by offering crowd sourced support where we could ask questions to other users."
"The storage for this solution could be improved."
"The storage for this solution could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"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."
"The product's pricing is low. I would rate it a two out of ten."
"The solution is expensive."
"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 have an enterprise licensing agreement, and I am not part of the finance department so I can't say how much it costs."
"It's cheaper than Bitbucket."
"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."
"There are no licensing fees for the features that we use."
"We pay a subscription-based yearly licensing fee for the solution."
"GitHub is an open-source product, but when using the free-to-use version, anyone can see the code we're working on."
"The licensing model for GitHub is user-based. Whenever the new developer joins we have to get a new license and register their ID. The overall price of the solution is reasonable."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Security Tools solutions are best for your needs.
896,467 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Construction Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Marketing Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
University
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 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: April 2026.
896,467 professionals have used our research since 2012.