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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
99
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

"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."
"Assess has an excellent API interface to pull APIs."
"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."
"It is a stable solution...Contrast Security Assess is one of the first players in this market, so they have experience and customers, especially abroad. Overall, it's a good product."
"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."
"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."
"I am impressed with the product's identification of alerts and vulnerabilities."
"When we access the application, it continuously monitors and detects vulnerabilities."
"During our use of GitHub, we have not encountered any problems and GitHub adds new features frequently."
"The most valuable aspects of GitHub are version control and parallel development."
"The deployment is fast since we just have to run the script, and once it's done, it takes a few minutes."
"The versioning of the code and the tracking of changes are definitely some of my top features."
"It’s great to find the talent who is available and has particular skills."
"The most valuable features are GitHub are the standard features, they are very useful."
"The ease of the planning board feature in GitHub is very valuable."
"The features of GitHub are very nice and helpful for developers."
 

Cons

"The solution should provide more details in the section where it shows that third-party libraries have CVEs or some vulnerabilities."
"Personalization of the board and how to make it appealing to an organization is something that could be done on their end."
"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."
"I would like to see them come up with more scanning rules."
"I would like to see them come up with more scanning rules."
"Regarding the solution's OSS feature, the one drawback that we do have is that it does not have client-side support."
"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 onboarding process could be simplified."
"GitHub could expand the limits of the free version."
"This solution could be improved by offering crowd sourced support where we could ask questions to other users."
"GitHub could add more security features. I am not sure how secure it is."
"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."
"The security for this solution could be tightened up and improved."
"GitHub storage is one of the main requirements and it could improve."
"Regarding improvements, I preferred the tool's earlier pricing model, which limited storage and the number of repositories instead of the number of users, which was more convenient from a customer perspective. I've also experienced issues with GitHub servers being unable to support moving repositories, which caused problems. For basic plans, no support was available to help resolve these issues. I think GitHub should provide more support for smaller businesses to help with these problems."
 

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."
"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."
"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 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'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 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."
"I haven't had to pay anything for GitHub, I use the free version."
"I use the free version of GitHub."
"If there are only 10 people using a particular repository, then GitHub is free. But if we increase the number of users, we need to pay the normal charge for GitHub."
"You don't have to pay for a license if you are using the free version."
"The price of this solution is reasonable."
"I use the free version of the tool."
"I am using the free version of the solution. However, there are some costs my organization pays."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
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 Enterprise15
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?
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.
892,383 professionals have used our research since 2012.