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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
6.7
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

"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"By far, the thing that was able to provide value was the immediate response while testing ahead of release, in real-time."
"Overall, it's a very good product."
"The solution is scalable."
"Any complex banking can be handled very easily in GitHub, and it allows us to integrate with tools like Grid, where we can merge and resolve conflicts without any hassle."
"GitHub's integrations with third-party applications are quite good for the needs that we have today."
"The product helps our team collaborate across different locations."
"Using the solution feels like we are running a massive development team comprising a couple of other employees and me."
"I use this solution to store my code in a repository so we can manage version control which is useful."
"Applying GitHub Actions saves so much time for the team because it automates the developer's work to the server."
 

Cons

"I would like to see them come up with more scanning rules."
"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 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."
"The solution needs to improve flexibility...The scalability of the product is a problem in the solution, especially from a commercial 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."
"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."
"Personalization of the board and how to make it appealing to an organization is something that could be done on their end."
"GitHub could automate the setup process more, such as creating YAML files for GitHub Actions."
"As of now, if I would like to learn about GitHub or its features, I would have to look on YouTube. It would be nice if they were able to send out a newsletter with explanations of new features that they are offering and what features are available."
"GitHub could add some more security features."
"GitHub could improve in resolving conflicts when multiple developers modify the same line of code."
"The GUI design is poor, so I exclusively use the CLI, which is much easier to use and understand."
"GitHub could add more security features. I am not sure how secure it is."
"The initial setup and implementation could be easier, I had some difficulties with it at first but I don't have a development background."
"There is a bit of a learning curve."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive."
"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."
"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 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."
"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 an open-source solution."
"I haven't had to pay anything for GitHub, I use the free version."
"We have an enterprise licensing agreement, and I am not part of the finance department so I can't say how much it costs."
"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."
"The price of this solution is reasonable."
"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."
"It is open-source. There is no license for GitHub."
"GitHub is an open-source application. It's free to use."
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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 Enterprise51
 

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?
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.
886,174 professionals have used our research since 2012.