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Contrast Security Protect vs SonarQube comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 5, 2025

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 Protect
Ranking in Application Security Tools
31st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SonarQube
Ranking in Application Security Tools
1st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
134
Ranking in other categories
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (1st), Software Development Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Application Security Tools category, the mindshare of Contrast Security Protect is 0.8%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SonarQube is 17.9%, down from 26.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Security Tools Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
SonarQube17.9%
Contrast Security Protect0.8%
Other81.3%
Application Security Tools
 

Featured Reviews

ToddMcAlister - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Application and Data Security Engineer at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees
It provides us with more in-depth visibility into ongoing attacks.
I rate Contrast Security Protect eight out of 10. Overall, it's a solid product, but I deduct a couple of points because of the interface and some shortcomings in the reporting. If you have a large enterprise where you're dealing with a lot of servers, then it makes sense not to use the internal MySQL database. You should use something like Oracle or Microsoft SQL, but if you don't have many transactions, the embedded MySQL database works great.
KH
Sr Software Engineering Supervisor at Mozarc Medical
Gains control over rule customization and achieves reliable vulnerability assessment
The deployment process took me about 2 or 3 hours to deploy SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube), although I do not remember exactly since it was done about 2 years back. Currently, about 10 of my developers are using SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) in my company. I do not have plans to increase the usage of SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) in the future as there will not be any requirement to increase. I am a senior software engineer and supervisor at Mozark Medical. My corporate email address is karthik.k.a.r.t.h.i.k.h.a.r.p.a.n.h.a.l.l.i@mozarkmedical.com. Overall, I would rate SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) as a 9 out of 10.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product gives a few false positives. We get 99 percent true positives."
"The solution has excellent real-time capabilities."
"Protect provides us with more in-depth visibility into ongoing attacks."
"SonarQube is admin friendly."
"The most valuable features are the segregation containment and the suspension of product services."
"The solution has a plug-in that supports both C and C++ languages."
"It assists during the development with SonarLint and helps the developer to change his approach or rather improve his coding pattern or style. That's one advantage I've seen. Another advantage is that we can customize the rules."
"We have the software metrics that SonarQube gives us, which is something we did not have before. This helps us work towards aiming coding standards to empower us to move in the direction of better code quality. SonarQube provides targets and metrics for that."
"The most valuable features of SonarQube Cloud (formerly SonarCloud) include code inspection, addressing technical debt, and identifying security vulnerabilities."
"I like that it has a better dashboard compared to Clockwork. It's also stable."
"The most valuable features are that it is user-friendly, easy to access, and they provide good training files."
 

Cons

"There's room for improvement in the initial setup."
"Contrast Security Protect needs to improve integration."
"Protect's reporting GUI is very basic. To get all statuses from the APIs, we needed to write our own KPI dashboard to provide reports."
"Code security scanning could be improved."
"An improvement is with false positives. Sometimes the tool can say there is an issue in your code but, really, you have to do things in a certain way due to external dependencies, and I think it's very hard to indicate this is the case."
"SonarQube's detail in the security could be improved. It may be helpful to have additional details, with regards to Oracle PL/SQL. For example, it's neither as built nor as thorough as Java. For now, this is the only additional feature I would like to see."
"The product's user documentation can be vastly improved."
"The pricing could be reduced a bit. It's a little expensive."
"We also use Fortify, which is another tool to find security errors. Fortify is a better security tool. It is better than SonarQube in finding errors. Sometimes, SonarQube doesn't find some of the errors that Fortify is able to find. Fortify also has a community, which SonarQube doesn't have. Its installation is a little bit complex. We need to install a database, install the product, and specify the version of the database and the product. They can simplify the installation and make it easier. We use docker for the installation because it is easier to use. Its dashboard needs to be improved. It is not intuitive. It is hard to understand the interface, and it can be improved to provide a better user experience."
"I would like to see SonarQube implement a good amount of improvements to the product's security features. Another aspect of SonarQube that could be improved is the search functionality."
"SonarCloud can improve the false positives. Sometimes the gates sometimes act a little weird. We then need to manually go and mark the false positive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The solution has a free version and a license version. The license is priced reasonably, the cost of hiring one programmer is more expensive than the solution."
"The developer edition is based on cost per lines of code."
"The price of SonarCloud could be less expensive. We are using the community version and the price should be more reasonable."
"Some of the plugins that were previously free are not free now."
"The free version of SonarQube does everything that we need it to."
"There are many different packages with different pricing options available. We are able to try what we have and if we need extra features we can upgrade the license."
"We use the free version; there are no hidden costs or licensing required."
"SonarQube enterprise, I am not sure of the price but from what I understand they are charging a fee. It's is not clear if it is an annual fee or a one-off."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Computer Software Company
7%
Insurance Company
4%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business41
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise79
 

Questions from the Community

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Is SonarQube the best tool for static analysis?
I am not very familiar with SonarQube and their solutions, so I can not answer. But if you are asking me about which tools that are the best for for Static Code Analysis, I suggest you have a look...
Which gives you more for your money - SonarQube or Veracode?
SonarQube is easy to deploy and configure, and also integrates well with other tools to do quality code analysis. SonarQube has a great community edition, which is open-source and free. Easy to use...
How would you decide between Coverity and Sonarqube?
We researched Coverity, but in the end, we chose SonarQube. SonarQube is a tool for reviewing code quality and security. It helps to guide our development teams during code reviews by providing rem...
 

Also Known As

Contrast Protect
Sonar, SonarQube Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Williams-Sonoma, Autodesk, HUAWEI, Chromeriver, RingCentral, Demandware.
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Contrast Security Protect vs. SonarQube and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
880,844 professionals have used our research since 2012.