Contrast Security Assess vs Tenable Security Center comparison

The compared Contrast Security and Tenable solutions aren't in the same category. Contrast Security is ranked #27 in SAST , and holds a 1.0% mindshare in the category. Tenable is ranked #3 in RBVM , with an average rating of 9.1, and holds a 8.9% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Contrast Security users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Tenable users who would recommend it.

Contrast Security Assess

Read 11 Contrast Security Assess reviews

2,206 Views
1,147 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Tenable Security Center

Read 56 Tenable Security Center reviews

7,756 Views
3,258 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Contrast Security Assess

Tenable Security Center

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

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

Find out what your peers are saying about SonarSource Sàrl, Veracode, Checkmarx and others in Static Application Security Testing (SAST).

To learn more, read our detailed Static Application Security Testing (SAST) Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

March 2026

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Helped 885,728 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 (29th), Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (27th)

Tenable Security Center

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Vulnerability Management (6th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th), Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

Contrast Security Assess and Tenable Security Center aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Contrast Security Assess is designed for Static Application Security Testing (SAST) and holds a mindshare of 1.0%, up 0.4% compared to last year.
Tenable Security Center, on the other hand, focuses on Risk-Based Vulnerability Management, holds 8.9% mindshare, down 16.5% since last year.

Static Application Security Testing (SAST) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Contrast Security Assess	1.0%
SonarQube	17.7%
Checkmarx One	10.4%
Other	70.9%

Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

Risk-Based Vulnerability Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Tenable Security Center	8.9%
Qualys VMDR	12.1%
Rapid7 InsightVM	10.5%
Other	68.5%

Risk-Based Vulnerability Management

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.

Read full review

reviewer1534134

Head of Information Security at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

Centralized analytics have strengthened patch visibility and support efficient regulatory reporting

From my experience, I assess the product's analytics capabilities as successful. It helped us significantly with patching and managing the risk of the patching process across all our environments, including network devices with Windows and Unix systems. The product covered several environments and gave us exactly what we needed in our environment. Tenable Security Center's centralized platform helped with risk assessment and management across our IT environments. It covered the patching process, and we previously faced many issues regarding how to patch different environments, how to monitor the patching process, and whether it was successful or not. We obtained good reports showing when patches were closed and the details of each patch, including who executed it and everything related to the patching process until it was closed. This gave us good details about the process which helped us significantly in our reporting and even in audits, whether internal or external. We learned how to close audit issues safely and successfully. We used the dashboards for real-time threat insights and extracted several dashboards from Tenable Security Center. We use these dashboards in our cybersecurity dashboard and committees that we have. These dashboards are part of our committees, especially the cybersecurity committee and other committees that we attend.

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 accuracy of the solution in identifying vulnerabilities is better than any other product we've used, far and away."

"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."

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

"Assess has brought our development time down because it helps create code the first time."

"It has helped us to improve the overall security posture of the company, we are able to address the findings before they have been reported by a third-party, and it has also helped us to gain our customers' trust."

"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 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."

"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."

More Contrast Security Assess pros

"The tool gives us fewer false positives. Compared to its competitors, the solution’s reports are more accurate."

"The usability is really good; it's very intuitive and any person can use it, you do not have to be an expert in vulnerability analysis."

"Very customizable with a lot of templates."

"Their overall cost of service is pretty good."

"Tenable.sc's best features are the availability model, accident management, and scoring."

"Tenable is the leading product for vulnerability scanning."

"This solution has a much lower rate of false positives compared to competing products."

"We use Tenable to scan all of our environments and plugins for vulnerabilities, and Tenable helps us discover network vulnerabilities to threats and piracy."

More Tenable Security Center pros

Cons

"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 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."

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

"Regarding the solution's OSS feature, the one drawback that we do have is that it does not have client-side support."

"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."

"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."

More Contrast Security Assess cons

"I think the company should redo their web page because the way things are now there are a lot of things you can't do."

"The licensing is a little involved from both sides. That may be due to our specific implementation of it because we are a defense contractor."

"The web application scanning area can be improved."

"The solution needs to improve its support. I would like to see a bird's eye view of my network architecture. I would also like to see the continuous view feature in the tool."

"One of the challenges that we may have experienced with that platform would be the flexibility of how to modify or create."

"Certain aspects require manual effort, such as exporting and analyzing data for our dashboards. The built-in components of the Tenable solution are somewhat clumsy that require external tools. So, this is an area of improvement."

"To be honest, I find SecurityCenter to be lacking in too many ways where my usage of it has been concerned."

"As it is now, integration with new tools has to be developed specifically, so it's not easy."

More Tenable Security Center cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive."

"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 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."

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

"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."

"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 pricing is more than Nexpose."

"The pricing depends upon the number of IPs."

"We pay around 60,000 on a yearly basis."

"We're able to save because we don't have to employ more staff members to help wit ht he scheduling of the scans, running the reports or sending them out to the systems owners. That alone is a big ROI for us."

"For 500 users the licensing fee is roughly $100,000."

"I would rate the pricing a nine out of ten, where ten is expensive. It is the most expensive tool my company is using."

"The tool costs around 15,000 Saudi riyals monthly."

"The licensing costs for this solution are approximately $100,000 US, and I think that covers everything."

More Tenable Security Center pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software 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	22
Midsize Enterprise	10
Large Enterprise	27

Questions from the Community

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What do you like most about Tenable SC?

The tool's dashboard and reporting capabilities match our company's needs since we are able to modify the basic view to create a new dashboard, and it works out very well for our needs.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Tenable SC?

The price of Tenable Security Center is not so high; it's relatively a cheaper solution.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Tenable SC?

We did conduct a long implementation which relates to what I think can be improved about Tenable Security Center. In some cases, we needed to refer back to Tenable itself, and in other cases, we ne...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 5% of the time

FortiDevSec vs Contrast Security Assess

Compared 4% of the time

SonarQube vs Contrast Security Assess

Compared 4% of the time

OpenText Core Application Security vs Contrast Security Assess

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Rapid7 InsightVM vs Tenable Security Center

Compared 10% of the time

Qualys VMDR vs Tenable Security Center

Compared 8% of the time

Tenable Nessus vs Tenable Security Center

Compared 7% of the time

Tenable Vulnerability Management vs Tenable Security Center

Compared 5% of the time

The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai vs Tenable Security Center

Compared 4% of the time

More Tenable Security Center Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Contrast Security Assess

March 2026

Download Contrast Security Assess product report

Buyer's Guide

Tenable Security Center

March 2026

Download Tenable Security Center product report

Also Known As

Contrast Assess

Tenable.sc, Tenable Unified Security, Tenable SecurityCenter

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

Get a risk-based view of your IT, security and compliance posture so you can quickly identify, investigate and prioritize your most critical assets and vulnerabilities.

Managed on-premises and powered by Nessus technology, the Tenable Security Center (formerly Tenable.sc) suite of products provides the industry’s most comprehensive vulnerability coverage with real-time continuous assessment of your network. It’s your complete end-to-end vulnerability management solution.

Tenable

Sample Customers

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

IBM, Sempra Energy, Microsoft, Apple, Adidas, Union Pacific

Buyer's Guide

Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

March 2026

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Find out what your peers are saying about SonarSource Sàrl, Veracode, Checkmarx and others in Static Application Security Testing (SAST). Updated: March 2026.

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