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Fortify Application Defender vs GitGuardian Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 28, 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

Fortify Application Defender
Ranking in Application Security Tools
25th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
GitGuardian Platform
Ranking in Application Security Tools
9th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (5th), Data Loss Prevention (DLP) (7th), Threat Intelligence Platforms (7th), Software Supply Chain Security (6th), DevSecOps (3rd), Non-Human Identity Management (NHIM) (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Application Security Tools category, the mindshare of Fortify Application Defender is 0.8%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of GitGuardian Platform is 0.9%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Security Tools Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
GitGuardian Platform0.9%
Fortify Application Defender0.8%
Other98.3%
Application Security Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Saroj-Patnaik - PeerSpot reviewer
Reliable solution with excellent machine learning algorithms but expensive and lacking support
I primarily use Fortify Application Defender to assess whether our products can defend against applications Fortify Application Defender's most valuable features are machine learning algorithms, real-time remediation, and automatic vulnerability notifications. Fortify Application Defender gives…
Ney Roman - PeerSpot reviewer
Facilitates efficient secret management and improves development processes
Regarding the exceptions in GitGuardian Platform, we know that within the platform we have a way to accept a path or a directory from a repository, but it is not that visible at the very beginning. You have to figure out where to search for it, and once you have it, it is really good, but it is not that visible at the beginning. This should be made more exposed. The documentation could be better because it was not that comprehensively documented. When we started working with GitGuardian Platform, it was difficult to find some specific use cases, and we were not aware of that. It might have improved now, but at that time, it was not something we would recommend.

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 features of Fortify Application Defender are the code packages that are default."
"The product saves us cost and time."
"The tool's most valuable feature is software composition analysis. This feature works well with my .NET applications, providing a better understanding of library vulnerabilities."
"The most valuable feature is that it analyzes data in real-time."
"The information from Fortify Application Defender on how to fix and solve issues is very good compared to other solutions."
"I find the configuration of rules in Fortify Application Defender useful. Its integration is also easy."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to automatically feed it rules what it's coupled with the WebInspect dynamic application scanning technology."
"Fortify Application Defender's most valuable features are machine learning algorithms, real-time remediation, and automatic vulnerability notifications."
"The secrets detection and alerting is the most important feature. We get alerted almost immediately after someone commits a secret. It has been very accurate, allowing us to jump on it right away, then figure out if we have something substantial that has been leaked or whether it is something that we don't have to worry about. This general main feature of the app is great."
"It actually creates an incident ticket for us. We can now go end-to-end after a secret has been identified, to track down who owns the repository and who is responsible for cleaning it up."
"My impression of the GitGuardian Platform's capability to detect secrets in real time has been really amazing, because it lets us protect or block the pipelines in which we deploy new applications so we can acknowledge when a secret is hardcoded in a repository, or when we have already hardcoded secrets within templates in our repos."
"The newest addition that we appreciate about GitGuardian Platform is the ability to create a custom detector, which we built and worked with the team, and that works very effectively."
"Presently, we find the pre-commit hooks more useful."
"The most valuable feature of GitGuardian is that it finds tokens and passwords. That's why we need this tool. It minimizes the possibility of security violations that we cannot find on our own."
"One thing I really like about it is the fact that we can add search words or specific payloads inside the tool, and GitGuardian will look into GitHub and alert us if any of these words is found in a repository... With this capability in the tool, we have good surveillance over our potential blind spots."
"We have definitely seen a return on investment when it finds things that are real. We have caught a couple things before they made it to production, and had they made it to production, that would have been dangerous."
 

Cons

"Fortify Application Defender gives a lot of false positives."
"The licensing can be a little complex."
"The product should integrate industry-standard code review tools internally with its system. This would streamline the coding process, as developers wouldn't need multiple tools for code review and security checks. Many independent and open-source tools are available, from Apache to various libraries. Using multiple DevOps pipeline tools can slow the turnaround time."
"The workbench is a little bit complex when you first start using it."
"The biggest complaint that I have heard concerns additional platform support because right now, it only supports applications that are written in .NET and Java."
"The false positive rate should be lower."
"I encountered many false positives for Python applications."
"The solution could improve the time it takes to scan. When comparing it to SonarQube it does it in minutes while in Fortify Application Defender it can take hours."
"An area for improvement is the front end for incidents. The user experience in this area could be much better."
"I would like to see improvement in some of the user interface features... When one secret is leaked in multiple files or multiple repositories, it will appear on the dashboard. But when you click on that secret, all the occurrences will appear on the page. It would be better to have one secret per occurrence, directly, so that we don't have to click to get to the list of all the occurrences."
"The main disadvantage I feel they should improve upon is that apart from flagging credential issues or secrets, they could incorporate something else to make it more dynamic."
"There is room for improvement in GitGuardian on Azure DevOps. The implementation is a bit hard there. This is one of the things we requested help with. I would not say their support is not good, but they need them to improve in helping customers on that side."
"I would like to see more fine-grained access controls when tickets are assigned for incidents. I would like the ability to provide more controls to the team leads or the product managers so that they can drive what we, the AppSec team, are doing."
"We'd like to request a new GitGuardian feature that automates user onboarding and access control for code repositories."
"One improvement that I'd like to see is a cleaner for Splunk logs. It would be nice to have a middle man for anything we send or receive from Splunk forwarders. I'd love to see it get cleaned by GitGuardian or caught to make sure we don't have any secrets getting committed to Splunk logs."
"GitGuardian encompasses many secrets that companies might have, but we are a Microsoft-only organization, so there are some limitations there in terms of their honey tokens. I'd like for it to not be limited to Amazon-based tokens. It would be nice to see a broader set of providers that you could pick from."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Fortify Application Defender is very expensive."
"The licensing is very complex, it's project based and can range from $10,000 to $200,000+ depending on the project type and size."
"The product’s price is much higher than other tools."
"The price of this solution could be less expensive."
"The base licensing costs for the SaaS platform is about $900 USD per application, per year."
"I rate the solution's pricing a five out of ten. It comes as an annual cloud subscription. The tool's pricing is around 50 lakhs."
"GitGuardian is on the pricier side."
"We have seen a return on investment. The amount of time that we would have spent manually doing this definitely outpaces the cost of GitGuardian. It is saving us about $35,000 a year, so I would say the ROI is about $20,000 a year."
"It's a bit expensive, but it works well. You get what you pay for."
"The pricing and licensing are fair. It isn't very expensive and it's good value."
"It's a little bit expensive."
"You get what you pay for. It's one of the more expensive solutions, but it is very good, and the low false positive rate is a really appealing factor."
"I compared the solution to a couple of other solutions, and I think it is very competitively priced."
"We don't have a huge number of users, but its yearly rate was quite reasonable when compared to other per-seat solutions that we looked at... Having a free plan for a small number of users was really great. If you're a small team, I don't see why you wouldn't want to get started with it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
9%
Government
19%
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise13
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Fortify Application Defender?
I find the configuration of rules in Fortify Application Defender useful. Its integration is also easy.
What needs improvement with Fortify Application Defender?
The product should integrate industry-standard code review tools internally with its system. This would streamline the coding process, as developers wouldn't need multiple tools for code review and...
What is your primary use case for Fortify Application Defender?
We use the solution for fast code review. It is integrated into our DevOps pipeline.
What do you like most about GitGuardian Internal Monitoring ?
It's also worth mentioning that GitGuardian is unique because they have a free tier that we've been using for the first twelve months. It provides full functionality for smaller teams. We're a smal...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for GitGuardian Internal Monitoring ?
It's competitively priced compared to others. Overall, the secret detection sector is expensive, but we are happy with the value we get.
What needs improvement with GitGuardian Internal Monitoring ?
GitGuardian Platform does what it is designed to do, but it still generates many false positives. We utilize the automated playbooks from GitGuardian Platform, and we are enhancing them. We will pr...
 

Also Known As

HPE Fortify Application Defender, Micro Focus Fortify Application Defender
GitGuardian Internal Monitoring, GitGuardian Public Monitoring
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ServiceMaster, Saltworks, SAP
Widely adopted by developer communities, GitGuardian is used by over 600 thousand developers and leading companies, including Snowflake, Orange, Iress, Mirantis, Maven Wave, ING, BASF, and Bouygues Telecom.
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortify Application Defender vs. GitGuardian Platform and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
867,370 professionals have used our research since 2012.