We performed a comparison between Contrast Security Assess and Sonatype Lifecycle based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Application Security Tools solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."When we access the application, it continuously monitors and detects vulnerabilities."
"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."
"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."
"Assess has an excellent API interface to pull APIs."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The accuracy of the solution in identifying vulnerabilities is better than any other product we've used, far and away. In our internal comparisons among different tools, Contrast consistently finds more impactful vulnerabilities, and also identifies vulnerabilities that are nearly guaranteed to be there, meaning that the chance of false positives is very low."
"The most valuable function of Sonatype Lifecycle is its code analysis capability, especially within the specific sub-product focusing on static analysis."
"Among its valuable features, it's easy to handle and easy configure, it's user-friendly, and it's easy to map and integrate."
"The data quality is really good. They've got some of the best in the industry as far as that is concerned. As a result, it helps us to resolve problems faster. The visibility of the data, as well as their features that allow us to query and search - and even use it in the development IDE - allow us to remediate and find things faster."
"The value I get from IQ Server is that I get information on real business risks. Is something compliant, are we using the proper license?"
"What's really nice about that is it shows a graph of all the versions for that particular component, and it marks out the ones that have a vulnerability and the ones that don't have a vulnerability."
"The application onboarding and policy grandfathering features are good and the solution integrates well with our existing DevOps tools."
"I like Fortify Software Security Center or Fortify SSC. This tool is installed on each developer's machine, but Fortify Software Security Center combines everything. We can meet there as security professionals and developers. The developers scan their code and publish the results there. We can then look at them from a security perspective and see whether they fixed the issues. We can agree on whether something is a false positive and make decisions."
"Lifecycle lets developers see any vulnerabilities or AGPL license issues associated with code in the early stages of development. The nice thing is that it's built into the ID so that they can see all versions of a specific code."
"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."
"I would like to see them come up with more scanning rules."
"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."
"The out-of-the-box reporting could be improved. We need to write our own APIs to make the reporting more robust."
"The solution needs to improve flexibility...The scalability of the product is a problem in the solution, especially from a commercial perspective."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"We do not use it for more because it is still too immature, not quite "finished." It is missing important features for making it a daily tool. It's not complete, from my point of view..."
"Fortify Static Code Analyzer has a bit of a learning curve, and I don't find it particularly helpful in narrowing down the vulnerabilities we should prioritize."
"If you look at NPM-based applications, JavaScript, for example, these are only checkable via the build pipeline. You cannot upload the application itself and scan it, as is possible with Java, because a file could change significantly."
"The GUI is simple, so it's easy to use. It started as great to use, but for larger scale companies, it also comes with some limitations. This is why we tried to move to more of an API approach. So, the GUI could use some improvements potentially."
"They're working on the high-quality data with Conan. For Conan applications, when it was first deployed to Nexus IQ, it would scan one file type for dependencies. We don't use that method in Conan, we use another file type, which is an acceptable method in Conan, and they didn't have support for that other file type. I think they didn't even know about it because they aren't super familiar with Conan yet. I informed them that there's this other file type that they could scan for dependencies, and that's what they added functionality for."
"The biggest thing that I have run into, which there are ways around, is being able to easily access the auditing data from a third-party tool; being able to pull all of that into one place in a cohesive manner where you can report off of that. We've had a little bit of a challenge with that. There are a number of things available to work with, to help with that in the tool, but we just haven't explored them yet."
"Fortify's software security center needs a design refresh."
"We use Azure DevOps as our application lifecycle management tool. It doesn't integrate with that as well as it does with other tools at the moment, but I think there's work being done to address that. In terms of IDEs, it integrates well. We would like to integrate it into our Azure cloud deployment but the integration with Azure Active Directory isn't quite as slick as we would like it to be. We have to do some workarounds for that at the moment."
Contrast Security Assess is ranked 31st in Application Security Tools with 11 reviews while Sonatype Lifecycle is ranked 6th in Application Security Tools with 43 reviews. Contrast Security Assess is rated 8.8, while Sonatype Lifecycle is rated 8.4. 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 Sonatype Lifecycle writes "Seamless to integrate and identify vulnerabilities and frees up staff time". Contrast Security Assess is most compared with Veracode, Seeker, Fortify WebInspect, HCL AppScan and Checkmarx One, whereas Sonatype Lifecycle is most compared with SonarQube, Black Duck, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, GitLab and Checkmarx One. See our Contrast Security Assess vs. Sonatype Lifecycle report.
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