Contrast Security Assess vs GitLab comparison

Read 85 GitLab reviews

3,135 Views
2,310 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Contrast Security Assess

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

Contrast Security Assess and GitLab both compete in the software security and development category. GitLab has the upper hand due to its extensive features and comprehensive platform, making it a valuable choice for organizations seeking an all-encompassing DevOps solution.

Features: Contrast Security Assess provides real-time vulnerability identification and accurate assessments with a low false positive rate. It integrates OSS analysis, enabling visibility into third-party library usage and stack traces for easier remediation. GitLab offers CI/CD pipelines, repository management, and seamless integration capabilities with a strong UI for developers, supporting the entire software development lifecycle.

Room for Improvement: Contrast Security Assess could improve in integrating more DevOps tools and enhancing its UI for non-security teams. Enhanced documentation for newcomers would also benefit GitLab which may need improvements in error tracing efficiency, offering more detailed insights into pipeline failures, and expanding open-source integration options further.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Contrast Security Assess is known for its easy integration into CI/CD platforms and effective customer support. GitLab provides flexibility with both cloud-based and self-hosted deployment options, supported by an active community and responsive customer service offering diverse implementation capabilities.

Pricing and ROI: Contrast Security Assess offers cost-efficient security-centric features that deliver robust ROI through enhanced vulnerability insights. GitLab, while priced higher, justifies the cost with its comprehensive features and strong ROI potential for organizations implementing wide-ranging DevOps solutions.

To learn more, read our detailed Contrast Security Assess vs. GitLab Report (Updated: June 2025).

Contrast Security Assess vs. GitLab

Download the complete report

Helped 859,687 peers since 2012

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

30th

Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

28th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

GitLab

Ranking in Application Security Tools

10th

Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

7th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Build Automation (1st), Release Automation (2nd), Rapid Application Development Software (11th), Software Composition Analysis (SCA) (5th), Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (2nd), Fuzz Testing Tools (2nd), DevSecOps (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Application Security Tools category, the mindshare of Contrast Security Assess is 0.7%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of GitLab is 2.7%, down from 2.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Security Tools

Featured Reviews

ToddMcAlister

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.

Read full review

Rohit Kesharwani

Manager, Engineering at 7-Eleven

Improved agility and time to market with CI/CD enhancements

The CI/CD pipelines in GitLab ( /products/gitlab-reviews ) are highly valuable. Another important feature is the single source of repository, allowing efficient repository management and source code management. GitLab provides manageability by allowing us to manage source code effectively through separate repositories. Additionally, GitLab enables the creation of individual CI/CD pipelines for each repository, making software more agile. By integrating GitLab as a DevOps platform, we have enhanced agility, improved our time to market, and different teams can work collaboratively on various projects.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"I am impressed with the product's identification of alerts and vulnerabilities."

"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."

"When we access the application, it continuously monitors and detects vulnerabilities."

"By far, the thing that was able to provide value was the immediate response while testing ahead of release, in real-time."

"Assess has an excellent API interface to pull APIs."

"In our most critical applications, we have a deep dive in the code evaluation, which was something we usually did with periodic vulnerability assessments, code reviews, etc. Now, we have real time access to it. It's something that has greatly enhanced our code's quality. We have actually embedded a KPI in regards to the improvement of our code shell. For example, Contrast provides a baseline where libraries and the usability of the code are evaluated, and they produce a score. We always aim to improve that score. On a quarterly basis, we have added this to our KPIs."

"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 accuracy of the solution in identifying vulnerabilities is better than any other product we've used, far and away. In our internal comparisons among different tools, Contrast consistently finds more impactful vulnerabilities, and also identifies vulnerabilities that are nearly guaranteed to be there, meaning that the chance of false positives is very low."

More Contrast Security Assess pros

"The solution makes the CI/CD pipelines easy to execute."

"Continuous integration with deployment is very powerful, which is a significant reason for migrating from TFS to GitLab."

"GitLab is a solution for source code management, container registry, pipelines, testing, and deployment."

"The most valuable functionality of GitLab, for me, is the DevOps. Besides the normal source control based on Git, I find the Auto DevOps features most important in the solution."

"I recommend GitLab for DevOps engineers."

"I have had no problem with the stability of the solution."

"The dashboard and interface make it easy to use."

"Their CI/CD engine is very mature. It's very comprehensive and flexible, and compared to other projects, I believe that GitLab is number one right now from that perspective."

More GitLab pros

Cons

"The solution needs to improve flexibility...The scalability of the product is a problem in the solution, especially from a commercial perspective."

"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."

"The solution should provide more details in the section where it shows that third-party libraries have CVEs or some vulnerabilities."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Contrast Security Assess cons

"I would like to have some features to support peer review."

"I would like configuration of a YML file to be done via UI rather than a code file."

"The initial setup was quite challenging because it takes some time to understand how to pull out or push the code."

"There are some challenges with repository file management as GitLab may struggle to manage larger files."

"Currently, GitLab is not easy to scale because GitLab has specific deployment instructions. We deploy it on one of the VMs."

"We are having a few problems integrating with Jira at the moment, which is something that our IT department is investigating."

"It would be better if there weren't any outages. There are occasions where we usually see a lot of outages using GitLab. It happens at least once a week or something like that. Whatever pipelines you're running, to check the logs, you need to have a different set of tools like Argus or something like that. If you have pipelines running on GitLab, you need a separate service deployed to view the logs, which is kind of a pain. If the logs can be used conveniently on GitLab, that would be definitely helpful. I'm not talking about the CI/CD pipelines but the back-end services and microservices deployed over GitLab. To view the logs for those microservices, you need to have separate log viewers, which is kind of a pain."

"I would like to see static analysis also embedded in GitLab. That would also help us. If there's something that it does internally by GitLab and then that is already tied up with your pipeline and then it can tell you that you're coding is good or your code is not great. Based on that, it would pass or fail. That should be streamlined. I would think that would help to a greater extent, in terms of having one solution rather than depending on multiple vendors."

More GitLab cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 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."

"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 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."

"GitLab is cheap."

"We are using the open-source version."

"I'm not sure if they have some kind of discount. I've been negotiating with them on prices before, and I believe they weren't too happy to give discounts, but list prices are $19 per user, per month for Premium and $99 per user, per month for Ultimate. So, the difference between Premium and Ultimate is a bit bigger, and in most companies, you need to build some type of business case."

"In total, I believe we have more than 300 licenses spread over about 100 users, though I can't comment on the costs involved."

"GitLab is an open-source solution."

"It seems reasonable. Our IT team manages the licenses."

"The initial setup cost is excellent and you can add the premium features later."

"On a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the pricing a five out of ten."

More GitLab pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Security Tools solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

859,687 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

22%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Computer Software Company

10%

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

13%

Educational Organization

12%

Government

10%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Contrast Security Assess?

When we access the application, it continuously monitors and detects vulnerabilities.

What needs improvement with Contrast Security Assess?

Technical support for the solution should be faster. We have to further analyze what kind of CVEs are in the reported libraries and what part of the code is affected. That analysis can be added to ...

What advice do you have for others considering Contrast Security Assess?

Contrast Security Assess is deployed on-cloud in our organization. I would recommend Contrast Security Assess to other users. It's a really good tool. It provides lots of details on web-based vulne...

What do you like most about GitLab?

I find the features and version control history to be most valuable for our development workflow. These aspects provide us with a clear view of changes and help us manage requests efficiently.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for GitLab?

The pricing and cost are on par with other tools and are neither too expensive nor cheap.

What needs improvement with GitLab?

One significant feature we lack is the configuration that enforces code reviews, which simplifies the development life cycle. Unfortunately, this is available only at a higher license level than we...

Seeker vs Contrast Security Assess

Comparisons

Compared 14% of the time

Veracode vs Contrast Security Assess

Compared 9% of the time

OWASP Zap vs Contrast Security Assess

Compared 9% of the time

SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) vs Contrast Security Assess

Compared 8% of the time

Invicti vs Contrast Security Assess

Compared 8% of the time

More Contrast Security Assess Competitors

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs GitLab

Compared 24% of the time

GitHub CoPilot vs GitLab

Compared 16% of the time

SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) vs GitLab

Compared 6% of the time

TeamCity vs GitLab

Compared 5% of the time

Tekton vs GitLab

Compared 5% of the time

More GitLab Competitors

Product Reports

Contrast Security Assess

Download Contrast Security Assess product report

Download GitLab product report

Also Known As

Contrast Assess

Fuzzit

Overview

Contrast Security is the world’s leading provider of security technology that enables software applications to protect themselves against cyberattacks, heralding the new era of self-protecting software. Contrast's patented deep security instrumentation is the breakthrough technology that enables highly accurate assessment and always-on protection of an entire application portfolio, without disruptive scanning or expensive security experts. Only Contrast has sensors that work actively inside applications to uncover vulnerabilities, prevent data breaches, and secure the entire enterprise from development, to operations, to production.

Contrast Security

GitLab is a complete DevOps platform that enables teams to collaborate and deliver software faster.

It provides a single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle, from planning and development to testing, deployment, and monitoring.

With GitLab, teams can streamline their workflows, automate processes, and improve productivity.

Sample Customers

Williams-Sonoma, Autodesk, HUAWEI, Chromeriver, RingCentral, Demandware.

1. NASA 2. IBM 3. Sony 4. Alibaba 5. CERN 6. Siemens 7. Volkswagen 8. ING 9. Ticketmaster 10. SpaceX 11. Adobe 12. Intuit 13. Autodesk 14. Rakuten 15. Unity Technologies 16. Pandora 17. Electronic Arts 18. Nordstrom 19. Verizon 20. Comcast 21. Philips 22. Deutsche Telekom 23. Orange 24. Fujitsu 25. Ericsson 26. Nokia 27. General Electric 28. Cisco 29. Accenture 30. Deloitte 31. PwC 32. KPMG

Contrast Security Assess vs. GitLab