We performed a comparison between Contrast Security Assess and Synopsys Defensics based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Sonar, Veracode, Checkmarx and others in Application Security Testing (AST)."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."
"By far, the thing that was able to provide value was the immediate response while testing ahead of release, in real-time."
"I am impressed with the product's identification of alerts and vulnerabilities."
"Assess has an excellent API interface to pull APIs."
"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."
"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."
"In our most critical applications, we have a deep dive in the code evaluation, which was something we usually did with periodic vulnerability assessments, code reviews, etc. Now, we have real time access to it. It's something that has greatly enhanced our code's quality. We have actually embedded a KPI in regards to the improvement of our code shell. For example, Contrast provides a baseline where libraries and the usability of the code are evaluated, and they produce a score. We always aim to improve that score. On a quarterly basis, we have added this to our KPIs."
"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."
"Whatever the test suit they give, it is intelligent. It will understand the protocol and it will generate the test cases based on the protocol: protocol, message sequence, protocol, message structure... Because of that, we can eliminate a lot of unwanted test cases, so we can execute the tests and complete them very quickly."
"The product is related to US usage with TLS contact fees, i.e. how more data center connections will help lower networking costs."
"We have found multiple issues in our embedded system network protocols, related to buffer overflow. We have reduced some of these issues."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"The solution should provide more details in the section where it shows that third-party libraries have CVEs or some vulnerabilities."
"Codenomicon Defensics should be more advanced for the testing sector. It should be somewhat easy and flexible to install."
"Sometimes, when we are testing embedded devices, when we trigger the test cases, the target will crash immediately. It is very difficult for us to identify the root cause of the crash because they do not provide sophisticated tools on the target side. They cover only the client-side application... They do not have diagnostic tools for the target side. Rather, they have them but they are very minimal and not very helpful."
"It does not support the complete protocol stack. There are some IoT protocols that are not supported and new protocols that are not supported."
Earn 20 points
Contrast Security Assess is ranked 22nd in Application Security Testing (AST) with 11 reviews while Synopsys Defensics is ranked 5th in Fuzz Testing Tools. Contrast Security Assess is rated 8.8, while Synopsys Defensics is rated 8.6. 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 Synopsys Defensics writes "Technical support provided protocol-specific documentation to prove that some positives were not false". Contrast Security Assess is most compared with Veracode, Seeker, Fortify WebInspect, Checkmarx One and HCL AppScan, whereas Synopsys Defensics is most compared with SonarQube, Snyk, Fortify on Demand, Invicti and HCL AppScan.
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