We performed a comparison between Contrast Security Assess and OWASP Zap based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Application Security Testing (AST) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Assess has an excellent API interface to pull APIs."
"The OWASP's tool is free of cost, which gives it a great advantage, especially for smaller companies to make use of the tool."
"It's great that we can use it with Portswigger Burp."
"Two features are valuable. The first one is that the scan gets completed really quickly, and the second one is that even though it searches in a limited scope, what it does in that limited scope is very good. When you use Zap for testing, you're only using it for specific aspects or you're only looking for certain things. It works very well in that limited scope."
"The solution is scalable."
"It has evolved over the years and recently in the last year they have added, HUD (Heads Up Display)."
"It updates repositories and libraries quickly."
"The reporting is quite intuitive, which gives you a clear indication of what kind of vulnerability you have that you can drill down on to gather more information."
"We use the solution for security testing."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution should provide more details in the section where it shows that third-party libraries have CVEs or some vulnerabilities."
"Contrast Security Assess covers a wide range of applications like .NET Framework, Java, PSP, Node.js, etc. But there are some like Ubuntu and the .NET Core which are not covered. They have it in their roadmap to have these agents. If they have that, we will have complete coverage."
"The solution needs to improve flexibility...The scalability of the product is a problem in the solution, especially from a commercial perspective."
"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."
"Deployment is somewhat complicated."
"The solution is somewhat unreliable because after we get the finding, we have to manually verify each of its findings to see whether it's a false positive or a true finding, and it takes time."
"Zap could improve by providing better reports for security and recommendations for the vulnerabilities."
"There's very little documentation that comes with OWASP Zap."
"It would be a great improvement if they could include a marketplace to add extra features to the tool."
"The technical support team must be proactive."
"The documentation is lacking and out-of-date, it really needs more love."
"It would be beneficial to enhance the algorithm to provide better summaries of automatic scanning results."
Contrast Security Assess is ranked 22nd in Application Security Testing (AST) with 11 reviews while OWASP Zap is ranked 8th in Application Security Testing (AST) with 37 reviews. Contrast Security Assess is rated 8.8, while OWASP Zap is rated 7.6. The top reviewer of Contrast Security Assess writes "We're gathering vulnerability data from multiple environments in real time, fundamentally changing how we identify issues in applications". On the other hand, the top reviewer of OWASP Zap writes "Great for automating and testing and has tightened our security ". Contrast Security Assess is most compared with Veracode, Seeker, Fortify WebInspect, Checkmarx One and SonarQube, whereas OWASP Zap is most compared with SonarQube, Acunetix, PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional and Qualys Web Application Scanning. See our Contrast Security Assess vs. OWASP Zap report.
See our list of best Application Security Testing (AST) vendors.
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