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Contrast Security Assess vs Ixia BreakingPoint comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 8, 2024

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 Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
21st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Application Security Tools (25th)
Ixia BreakingPoint
Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
32nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Static Application Security Testing (SAST) category, the mindshare of Contrast Security Assess is 1.3%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Ixia BreakingPoint is 0.7%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Contrast Security Assess1.3%
Ixia BreakingPoint0.7%
Other98.0%
Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
 

Featured Reviews

Eucharia Okafor - PeerSpot reviewer
Dev Ops Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Continuous in-app security has transformed our development workflow and has reduced manual checks
Contrast Security Assess changes how the team thinks about security. Instead of us waiting for a security audit at the end of any sprint, vulnerabilities surface as developers are writing and testing code. That shift is significant because fixing a bug in development costs more than fixing it later. It captures everything right there and remediates it because it catches vulnerability and remediates immediately while the application is running. It improves our collaboration between development and security teams, as developers get clear actionable findings immediately. We get continuous visibility into our application risk posture. Ultimately, it helps us to shift fast and save money, which is usually a trade-off, but Contrast Security Assess makes both possible. The feature that stands out most to me in Contrast Security Assess is the ability to capture vulnerability while the application is running. Another standout feature is the real-time detection that finds vulnerabilities as code runs. It has fewer false positives and works continuously in the application; you install it and it is there. It captures issues during development quickly and is easily integrated with a CI/CD pipeline, especially if you are using GitLab or GitHub. The real-time detection feature of Contrast Security Assess helps us very well compared to traditional SAST tools. Traditional tools scan from the outside and guess where problems might be. Contrast Security Assess works from the inside because it is embedded into the application. The agent lives inside the running application, allowing it to see exactly what is happening in real-time. This means we are getting accurate alerts instead of a long list of potential issues that require manual investigation. When it comes to the CI/CD pipeline, Contrast Security Assess really shines for our daily work, as it plugs directly into tools like Jenkins, GitHub, or Azure DevOps. When a developer commits code and triggers a build, Contrast Security Assess is already testing it in the background. If there is any vulnerability, the pipeline automatically flags or stops the application before bad code reaches production. This means security becomes everyone's responsibility, not just the security team's, and it gives us real-time, accurate security that fits into how our team already works.
Sai Prasad - PeerSpot reviewer
Staff QA Engineer at Virsec
Works better for testing traffic, mix profile, and enrollment scenarios than other solutions
Once, when I raised a ticket regarding a hardware or software issue, the solution's support team visited our company to discuss and find out ways to solve the problem. Sometimes, they asked us to send several photos from the back and front end to identify the issue. It was time-consuming as we were occupied with some other testing simultaneously. Instead, it would have been great if they could have visited our company and rectified the problem.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"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."
"Contrast Security Assess has positively impacted my organization by providing more control over secure software development."
"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 an excellent API interface to pull APIs."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is Layer 7 traffic generation such as Facebook, Netflix, WhatsApp."
"The solution has many protocols and options, making it very flexible."
"I like that we can test cloud applications."
"There is a virtual version of the product which is scaled to 100s of virtual testing blades."
"It is a scalable solution."
"The most valuable feature of Ixia BreakingPoint is the ransomware and malware database for simulated attacks."
"The DDoS testing module is useful and quick to use."
"BPS VE evaluation was used for testing LTE Network elements with a focus on user plane testing BPS VE along with its UI and new concepts to reduce the complexity of manual testing to a large extent."
 

Cons

"I do find that here and there with Contrast Security Assess there are user interface issues, particularly with how they work with libraries."
"I think Contrast can also integrate with some AI tools and provide chat features if possible, so in case we have any more questions, we can chat with that chatbot and get remediations, which I believe would be a better enhancement to Contrast."
"Contrast Security Assess could improve in the reporting and the dashboard experience."
"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."
"The out-of-the-box reporting could be improved. We need to write our own APIs to make the reporting more robust."
"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."
"I would like to see them come up with more scanning rules."
"The solution should provide more details in the section where it shows that third-party libraries have CVEs or some vulnerabilities."
"I would appreciate some preconfigured network neighborhoods, which are predefined settings for testing networks."
"The integration could improve in Ixia BreakingPoint."
"They should improve UI mode packages for the users."
"The production traffic simulations are not realistic enough for some types of DDoS attacks."
"The flash GUI has room for improvement."
"The solution originally was hard to configure; I'm not sure if they've updated this to make it simpler, but if not, it's something that could be streamlined."
"Currently BPS VE's REST API was just developed (some specific functionalities are implemented) and can be improved for better control over the tool using scripts, which help in test automation."
"The SSL simulation is realistic but some kinds of tests work imperfectly."
 

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."
"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 product's pricing is low. I would rate it a two out of ten."
"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."
"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."
"We have a one year subscription license for $25,000 US Dollars."
"or us, the pricing is somewhere around $12,000 a year. I'm unsure as to what new licenses now cost."
"The solution is expensive."
"The price is high. We pay for the license monthly."
"There is no differentiation in licenses for Breaking Point. For one license, you will get all the features. There is no complexity in that."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Construction Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Construction Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise10
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Contrast Security Assess?
I was not involved in the negotiation of pricing for Contrast Security Assess, but I am somewhat familiar with setup cost and licensing. Licensing costs are fairly high compared to other DAST and S...
What needs improvement with Contrast Security Assess?
I do find that here and there with Contrast Security Assess there are user interface issues, particularly with how they work with libraries. The way that it works is people have access to library d...
What advice do you have for others considering Contrast Security Assess?
I would give Contrast Security Assess a score of 8 out of 10. That is a small little issue, but it is a great product and I would recommend it to others. There are a couple things that could be imp...
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Also Known As

Contrast Assess
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Williams-Sonoma, Autodesk, HUAWEI, Chromeriver, RingCentral, Demandware.
Corsa Technology
Find out what your peers are saying about Contrast Security Assess vs. Ixia BreakingPoint and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,647 professionals have used our research since 2012.