Contrast Security Assess vs Rapid7 InsightAppSec comparison

The compared Contrast Security and Rapid7 solutions aren't in the same category. Contrast Security is ranked #28 in SAST , with an average rating of 8.0, and holds a 0.5% mindshare in the category. Rapid7 is ranked #2 in DAST , with an average rating of 7.8, and holds a 11.8% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Contrast Security users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Rapid7 users who would recommend it.

Contrast Security Assess

Read 11 Contrast Security Assess reviews

1,269 Views
723 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Rapid7 InsightAppSec

Read 19 Rapid7 InsightAppSec reviews

1,598 Views
368 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Contrast Security Assess

Rapid7 InsightAppSec

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Contrast Security Assess and Rapid7 InsightAppSec based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Static Application Security Testing (SAST) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Contrast Security Assess vs. Rapid7 InsightAppSec Report (Updated: May 2022).

Buyer's Guide

Contrast Security Assess vs. Rapid7 InsightAppSec

May 2022

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Helped 862,624 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

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Security Tools (30th), Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (28th)

Rapid7 InsightAppSec

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

While both are Quality Assurance solutions, they serve different purposes. Contrast Security Assess is designed for Static Application Security Testing (SAST) and holds a mindshare of 0.5%, up 0.4% compared to last year.
Rapid7 InsightAppSec, on the other hand, focuses on Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST), holds 11.8% mindshare, down 12.6% since last year.

Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST)

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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Shritam Bhowmick

Vulnerability Management Lead at garrett

Provides reliable applications security but needs better integration options

There are areas for improvements regarding false positives. Integration capabilities are lacking, as options for integrations with other tools such as SNOW, Jira, or other integration tools are not sufficient in Rapid7 InsightAppSec. The user interface sometimes has glitches, which may prevent appropriate results during navigation, and even when we get appropriate results, it can be impossible to export them to CSV records or download files. Regarding scalability, Rapid7 InsightAppSec is not a scalable solution for our industry due to limited integration capabilities. Rapid7 relies on another tool called InsightConnect, which requires additional investment, detracting from scalability. Another area that needs improvement is the integration of AI capabilities into the platform. Both Rapid7 InsightAppSec and InsightVM need to advance in that area. In terms of behavioral and pattern recognition, identifying complex attacks such as SQL, blind SQL, JSON, and LDAP injections often results in 94% false positives. This necessitates improvement in their behavioral-based analytics feature.

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

"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 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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

More Contrast Security Assess pros

"In Rapid7 InsightAppSec, a distinctive feature is the provision of a CDM for integrating web servers and web applications. To establish the connection between these applications, you only need to paste the provided CDN into your metadata. Once connected, every piece of information, including vulnerabilities, can be accessed. It also offers demo sessions."

"Dynamic application security scanning provides predefined templates and supports customization. The ability to scan external and internal applications, including on-premises ones, is precious. Additionally, it is a cloud platform, so we don't need to deploy servers or resources. This makes it time-efficient and cost-effective."

"It is very convenient to get reports from the tool, which offers high-level environmental statistics."

"The initial setup for us was easy enough. We didn't face too many issues. Deployment took maybe 30 minutes. It's quite quick and doesn't cause too much trouble at the outset."

"It's very easy to use and user-friendly. It does the job."

"You have various attack modules, and you also have the Attack Replay feature for the attack sequence. You can reproduce an attack and see it. That is a very good feature I noticed in this solution. It helps developers as well."

"Relatively speaking, InsightAppSec is good compared to Insight VM."

"It is a very robust solution."

More Rapid7 InsightAppSec pros

Cons

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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 more details of what the product can do."

"There is room for improvement in Rapid7 InsightAppSec by giving clients the ability for extra columns on reports and enabling the extraction of remediation reports into a CSV format. Currently, the PDF format is cumbersome to go through when dealing with thousands of pages."

"Rapid7 InsightAppSec needs improvement in detecting phishing pages."

"The only concern I have with Rapid7 is that it does not provide enough information about vulnerabilities within AppSec."

"They should add more features. I would like to see them do a little more on static analysis and also interactivity analysis. Currently, it does very basic static analysis. It could do a little more static analysis, which is something that would help. A lot more interactivity analysis should also be there. It should basically look at security during interactivity."

"The product’s pricing could be flexible."

"I required a solution to manage on-premises, but I was not as satisfied as expected."

"There is room for improvement in the response time of customer service and support levels."

More Rapid7 InsightAppSec cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 solution is expensive."

"The price of this product is very cheap."

"I rate Rapid7 InsightAppSec’s pricing an eight out of ten."

"Rapid7 InsightAppSec is cheap."

"Its price is competitive. It is not expensive."

"I'm not sure how much it costs exactly, but I know it's expensive."

"They offer a good price, but I don't remember its cost. It is fair as compared to the competition. We have opted for project-based licensing, not user-based. We can add any number of users. That doesn't matter. It is worth the money."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

21%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

10%

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Government

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.

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Rapid7 InsightAppSec?

In Rapid7 InsightAppSec, a distinctive feature is the provision of a CDM for integrating web servers and web applications. To establish the connection between these applications, you only need to p...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Rapid7 InsightAppSec?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Rapid7 InsightAppSec?

Our main use case for Rapid7 InsightAppSec is to perform internal assessment of applications and external facing applications. We have a cloud engine plus on-premises engine, and we have been lever...

See all answers

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Contrast Security Assess

July 2025

Download Contrast Security Assess product report

Buyer's Guide

Rapid7 InsightAppSec

July 2025

Download Rapid7 InsightAppSec product report

Also Known As

Contrast Assess

InsightAppSec

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

Your web applications may be complex, but your application security testing tool doesn’t need to be. InsightAppSec brings Rapid7’s proven Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) technology to the Insight platform, combining powerful application crawling and attack capabilities, flexibility in scan scope and scheduling, and accuracy in results with a modern UI, intuitive workflows, and sensible data organization. This enables you to identify XSS, SQL injection, CSRF, and other vulnerabilities with unparalleled ease. The best part? All of these capabilities are delivered via the cloud so that you’re up and running in minutes to identify the critical security risks that exist in your applications.

Rapid7

Sample Customers

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

CenterPoint Energy, CPA Australia, Hypertherm, First American Financial Corporation, Rackspace

Buyer's Guide

Contrast Security Assess vs. Rapid7 InsightAppSec

May 2022

Free Report: Contrast Security Assess vs. Rapid7 InsightAppSec

Find out what your peers are saying about Contrast Security Assess vs. Rapid7 InsightAppSec and other solutions. Updated: May 2022.

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