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Contrast Security Assess vs NowSecure comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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)
NowSecure
Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
41st
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Mobile App Testing Tools (21st)
 

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 NowSecure is 0.7%, up from 0.2% 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%
NowSecure0.7%
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.
AN
Quality Assurance and Analyst Intern at a university with 201-500 employees
Scalable and reliable, but dynamic analysis needs improvement
I would advise others when testing using NowSecure to do secondary tests with other tools. For example, set it up in the local environment and recheck what the results of the reports are. Since the dynamic results are less accurate, I would suggest using static analysis. I rate NowSecure a seven out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Security feedback comes to developers instantly with Contrast Security Assess, reducing costs by about 50%."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Overall, the product is strong and improving, support is responsive and effective, and supported integrations work for many customers."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to download an application without actually putting in the APK, as it gives us an option to put the APK in if we want to, but we can also download it from the App Store and Play Store."
 

Cons

"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."
"Regarding Contrast Security Assess's AI capabilities, I think they are missing a huge opportunity because they could lead the way in automatic testing and AI security testing, but currently, they do not offer this functionality, which is a shame."
"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."
"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."
"Their level of support and troubleshooting for the product is limited because of how they handle troubleshooting. It's done through a log file that's very cumbersome to work with."
"The solution should provide more details in the section where it shows that third-party libraries have CVEs or some vulnerabilities."
"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."
"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."
"In this solution, there are two kinds of testing, static analysis, and dynamic analysis. There needs some improvement in testing with dynamic analysis because I have found it is not accurate"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Construction Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
22%
Retailer
19%
Construction Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise10
No data available
 

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
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Williams-Sonoma, Autodesk, HUAWEI, Chromeriver, RingCentral, Demandware.
Vaporstream, FIS, MEA Financial, Silent Circle, Capital One, Citi, EY, EMC, Emerson, Kaiser Permanente, The Home Depot, Humana, Shell, Kellogg's, TD Bank, VMware
Find out what your peers are saying about SonarSource Sàrl, Checkmarx, Veracode and others in Static Application Security Testing (SAST). Updated: August 2026.
909,647 professionals have used our research since 2012.