Contrast Security Assess vs Klocwork comparison

Contrast Security and Perforce are both solutions in the Application Security Tools category. Contrast Security is ranked #26 with an average rating of 8.0, while Perforce is ranked #19 with an average rating of 8.2. Contrast Security holds a 0.8% mindshare in AS, compared to Perforce’s 1.4% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Contrast Security users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Perforce users who would recommend it.

Contrast Security Assess

Read 11 Contrast Security Assess reviews

1,313 Views
827 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Klocwork

Read 25 Klocwork reviews

3,353 Views
1,878 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Contrast Security Assess

Klocwork

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 8, 2024

Klocwork and Contrast Security Assess are leading security analysis tools in the software development category. Contrast Security Assess appears to have an edge due to its advanced feature set, although Klocwork is preferred for its pricing and customer support.

Features: Klocwork provides robust static code analysis with comprehensive coverage, seamless integration with existing systems, and a reputation for being user-friendly. Contrast Security Assess offers real-time vulnerability detection, dynamic analysis capabilities, and superior remediation features.

Room for Improvement: Klocwork could improve scalability for large projects, increase update frequency, and enhance its user interface. Contrast Security Assess may need to boost scanning speed, provide clearer documentation, and refine its support for different programming languages.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Klocwork is praised for straightforward deployment and responsive customer service. Contrast Security Assess integrates smoothly with CI/CD pipelines but reportedly has slower support channels, making support less responsive than desired.

Pricing and ROI: Klocwork offers competitive pricing with satisfactory ROI, suitable for smaller teams focusing on cost-effectiveness. Contrast Security Assess, while perceived as costlier, provides a substantial ROI for those valuing comprehensive features, justifying the investment for businesses seeking in-depth security measures.

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

Buyer's Guide

Contrast Security Assess vs. Klocwork

September 2025

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Helped 869,566 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

26th

Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

27th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Klocwork

Ranking in Application Security Tools

19th

Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

17th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Static Code Analysis (6th)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Application Security Tools category, the mindshare of Contrast Security Assess is 0.8%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Klocwork is 1.4%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Security Tools Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Klocwork	1.4%
Contrast Security Assess	0.8%
Other	97.8%

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.

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AnirbanSarkar

Head - Solution Management Group at Meteonic Innovation Pvt. Ltd.

Lets you find defects during the development phase, so you don't have to wait till the development is over to find and address flaws

What needs improvement in Klocwork, compared to other products in the market, is the dashboard or reporting mechanisms that need to be a bit more flexible. The Klocwork dashboard could be improved. Though it's good, it's not as good as some of the other products in the market, which is a problem. The reporting could be more detailed and easier to sort out because sorting in Klocwork could be a bit more time-consuming, mainly when sorting defects based on filters, compared to how it's done on other tools such as Coverity. What I'd like added in the next release of Klocwork is the peer code review Cahoots which used to be a part of Klocwork, and the architecture analysis and both have been taken out of Klocwork. I found the two critical for specific deployments, so if those can be brought back to Klocwork, that would be very good.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"No other tool does the runtime scanning like Contrast does. Other static analysis tools do static scanning, but Contrast is runtime analysis, when the routes are exercised. That's when the scan happens. This is a tool that has a very unique capability compared to other tools. That's what I like most about Contrast, that it's runtime."

More Contrast Security Assess pros

"Klocwork's most valuable feature is the static code analysis feature. It detects the potential problem earlier to allow the developer to receive feedback quickly and then address it before it becomes a problem."

"The best advantage of Klocwork is the reduced setup time."

"The customer support team is very responsive, proactive, and engages in conversations to ensure our needs are met."

"One can increase the number of vendors, so the solution is scalable."

"The reporting helps us understand the trend of our results and whether we improve over time. We can see the history within Klocwork's server architecture and know that we're making things better. It creates a great story for our management. We can demonstrate value and how our software is developing over time."

"The best advantage of Klocwork is the reduced setup time."

"On-the-fly analysis and incremental analysis are the best parts of Klocwork. Currently, we are using both of these features very effectively."

"Technical support is quite good."

More Klocwork pros

Cons

"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 out-of-the-box reporting could be improved. We need to write our own APIs to make the reporting more robust."

"The product's retesting part needs improvement. The tool also needs improvement in the suggestions provided for fixing vulnerabilities. It relies more on documentation rather than on quick fixes."

"I would like to see them come up with more scanning rules."

"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."

"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 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."

More Contrast Security Assess cons

"Klocwork has to improve its features to stay ahead of other free solutions."

"The way to define the rules is too complex. The definition/rules for static analysis could be automated according to various SILs, so as to avoid confusion."

"Modern languages, such as Angular and .NET, should be included as a part of Klocwork. They have recently added Kotlin as a part of their project, but we would like to see more languages in Klocwork. That's the reason we are using Coverity as a backup for some of the other languages."

"Now the only issue we have is that whenever we need to get the code we have to build it first. Then we can get the report."

"What needs improvement in Klocwork, compared to other products in the market, is the dashboard or reporting mechanisms that need to be a bit more flexible. The Klocwork dashboard could be improved. Though it's good, it's not as good as some of the other products in the market, which is a problem. The reporting could be more detailed and easier to sort out because sorting in Klocwork could be a bit more time-consuming, mainly when sorting defects based on filters, compared to how it's done on other tools such as Coverity."

"Klocwork sometimes provides too many additional warnings which require expertise to manage."

"I hope that in each new release they add new features relating to the addition of checkers, improving their analysis engines etc."

"Klocwork sometimes provides too many additional warnings which require expertise to manage."

More Klocwork cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive."

"The product's pricing is low. I would rate it a two out of ten."

"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 limitation that we have is that Klocwork is licensed to certain programs, and if you want to license them to other programs, you have to pay more money."

"The pricing for Klocwork is very competitive if you compare it from apple to apple. It has competitive pricing regarding the licensing model and the per-license cost. Klocwork isn't a high-end investment for anyone deploying it; even SMBs can afford it. The Klocwork cost per user would depend on the license type, so I'm unable to mention a ballpark figure because it would depend on the type of installation and how the deployment will be, and the nodes to give an accurate calculation or figure. The total price depends on the package, so my company could never publish pricing for Klocwork on the website. My team first collects information from potential clients on the deployment scenario, project environment, etc., before suggesting a package for Klocwork. My rating for Klocwork in terms of pricing is a five because of its flexible license models. There's a license model for every type of organization, whether small, midsize, or enterprise, so it's a five out of five for me."

"Klocwork is still tight on their licensing. If Klocwork would loosen up on the licensing, and where the license could be used, and how many different programs could be run on it, then we have several development programs that I would love to be able to use it for going forward."

"Licensing fees are paid annually, but they also have a perpetual license."

"When it comes to licensing, the solution has two packages, one for a fixed and the other for a floating server, with the former being more cost effective than the latter."

"There are other solutions on the market such as Microsoft Visual Studio. They have been adding more static code analysis features that come for free. It is getting better all the time. That is one of the possibilities is that we've been considering that we may stop using the Klocwork because it doesn't give us any added value."

"This solution offers competitive pricing."

"Klocwork should not to be quite so heavy handed on the licensing for very specific programs."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

23%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Computer Software Company

Insurance Company

Manufacturing Company

26%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Transportation Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	12
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	12

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Contrast Security Assess?

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

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Klocwork?

Klocwork's pricing seems attractive, as it uses a per-user license model that does not have a lot of overhead.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Klocwork?

One area for improvement is that when customers use different static analysis tools, they report more issues compared to Klocwork. The static analysis engine of Klocwork has areas that need improve...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Klocwork?

I work on tools such as Klocwork, LDRA, as well as Jira and Confluence, focusing more on the software quality assurance aspect. We use Klocwork for coding and aggregate checks. We use it for static...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 21% of the time

Seeker Interactive vs Contrast Security Assess

Compared 14% of the time

SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) vs Contrast Security Assess

Compared 10% of the time

PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional vs Contrast Security Assess

Compared 9% of the time

Qualys Web Application Scanning vs Contrast Security Assess

Compared 9% of the time

More Contrast Security Assess Competitors

Coverity Static vs Klocwork

Compared 28% of the time

SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) vs Klocwork

Compared 27% of the time

Polyspace Code Prover vs Klocwork

Compared 14% of the time

Helix QAC vs Klocwork

Compared 6% of the time

Axivion Static Code Analysis vs Klocwork

Compared 5% of the time

More Klocwork Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Contrast Security Assess

October 2025

Download Contrast Security Assess product report

Buyer's Guide

Klocwork

September 2025

Download Klocwork product report

Also Known As

Contrast Assess

No data available

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

Klocwork detects security, safety, and reliability issues in real-time by using this static code analysis toolkit that works alongside developers, finding issues as early as possible, and integrates with teams, supporting continuous integration and actionable reporting.

Perforce

Sample Customers

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

ACCESS Co Ltd, Risk-AI, Winbond Electronics, Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharmaceutical Research Institute, University of Southern California, Alebra Technologies, SIMULIA, Risk Management Solutions, Brigham Young University, SRD, HRL

Buyer's Guide

Contrast Security Assess vs. Klocwork

September 2025

Free Report: Contrast Security Assess vs. Klocwork

Find out what your peers are saying about Contrast Security Assess vs. Klocwork and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.

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