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Contrast Security Assess vs Semgrep comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.8
Contrast Security Assess improves code quality, reduces costs, and streamlines workflows by detecting vulnerabilities early, enhancing efficiency.
Sentiment score
6.6
Semgrep boosts ROI by enhancing code quality, reducing labor costs, and increasing development speed through automated analysis.
Contrast has probably saved us a couple hundred hours over the past six years.
Threat & Vulnerability Management Senior Analyst at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The speed of fixing issues is significantly improved due to the vast amount of information provided by Contrast Security Assess, making it quite essential for finding the root cause of problems in the source code.
Management Of Quality Managers at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
We have saved time by automating code analysis processes, which has reduced the number of employees needed for manual reviews.
DevOps SRO Specialist at a manufacturing company with 201-500 employees
This can be translated to being able to do the same amount of work with less technicians.
SecOps Engineer at a real estate/law firm with 501-1,000 employees
Tasks that previously took days are completed in significantly less time.
DevOps Engineer at Exponential Craft
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
8.4
Contrast Security Assess support is responsive and knowledgeable, with efficient issue resolution and high user satisfaction despite customization challenges.
Sentiment score
6.0
Semgrep excels with clear documentation and support, fostering a proactive community that minimizes the need for direct assistance.
They go out of their way to respond quickly and very knowledgeably.
Threat & Vulnerability Management Senior Analyst at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Customer support is one of the strongest points of Contrast Security Assess, as they are really responsive and answer tickets in less than one hour.
Management Of Quality Managers at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
When I created custom rules, I had some doubts, and the documentation was very helpful, simple, and easy to understand.
Senior Software Engineer 2 at Porch
Their documentation and community are very active, so most of the time when problems occur, I get a solution.
Security Researcher at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Customer support and services for Semgrep are very reliable and good.
Angular developer at Flourish software
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.0
Contrast Security Assess offers scalability across platforms but faces challenges with change management and limited technology support.
Sentiment score
8.4
Semgrep scales well across multiple repositories, efficiently supporting both small and large teams despite minor enterprise tool comparisons.
It is fairly simple to install the agents for Contrast Security Assess and keep them updated.
Threat & Vulnerability Management Senior Analyst at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Contrast Security Assess's scalability is not an issue at all.
Management Of Quality Managers at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
I was able to control it from 10 repositories or 10 services to thousands of repositories in a couple of minutes very simply.
Cloud & Application Security at Sixt SE
This is an open-source tool, so it absolutely does the job, but if you were to implement a tool such as this in an enterprise, this would probably not be scalable.
DevSecOps Security Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Semgrep makes it easy to integrate and grow within any environment without concern for crashes.
DevOps Engineer at Exponential Craft
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Contrast Security Assess is highly stable and reliable, with occasional environment-related issues and limited ColdFusion support.
Sentiment score
8.1
Semgrep is stable but faces issues with scan times, AI scanning, onboarding repos, and needing better integration and notifications.
We opened a ticket to customer support and experienced four weeks of disruption due to the extension malfunctioning in some of the .NET servers running Contrast Security Assess.
Management Of Quality Managers at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
If there is no master branch or default branch, the tool fails to identify it and will never scan it unless manually somebody looks into it and fixes the issue.
Cloud & Application Security at Sixt SE
Since I have been using it, I have not experienced any downtime.
Angular developer at Flourish software
Semgrep is stable, as far as my experience indicates.
Senior Software Engineer 2 at Porch
 

Room For Improvement

Contrast Security Assess offers effective automation but requires better documentation, integration, reporting, support, pricing flexibility, and AI enhancements.
Semgrep needs enhancements in false positives, documentation, dependency analysis, scan times, integrations, AI features, interfaces, security, and reporting.
Regarding Contrast Security Assess's AI capabilities, I think they are missing a huge opportunity because they could lead the way in automatic testing and AI security testing.
Management Of Quality Managers at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Contrast support has been great in fixing any issues or getting back to us with questions.
Threat & Vulnerability Management Senior Analyst at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Contrast Security Assess can be improved as it checks the code and asks to fix the code that is vulnerable, and in that way, we can prevent potential hacking or attempts for people to inject malicious code.
Postdoctoral Research Fellow at a program development consultancy with 1-10 employees
The UI and additional dashboarding and other details would definitely make the tool more user-friendly and more of a candidate to be implemented in an enterprise.
DevSecOps Security Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Currently, they are working on identifying business logic vulnerabilities or privilege escalation vulnerabilities by looking at the code, and they should continue to focus on and improve this effort.
Cloud & Application Security at Sixt SE
More advanced dependency analysis features in the SCA part and deeper vulnerability databases would be beneficial.
SecOps Engineer at a real estate/law firm with 501-1,000 employees
 

Setup Cost

Contrast Security Assess offers scalable pricing based on application size and environment, ranging from $20,000 to $100,000 annually.
Enterprise users find Semgrep cost-effective and easy to integrate, with favorable pricing starting at $30 per month.
Licensing costs are fairly high compared to other DAST and SAST tools, but it seems to be worth the money.
Threat & Vulnerability Management Senior Analyst at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Once we fully integrated it into our company, it has proven to be price-efficient at around $30 a month.
Senior Software Engineer 2 at Porch
It is basically open-source, so the cost to set up is no cost.
Security Researcher at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
It offers very reasonable pricing and costs.
Angular developer at Flourish software
 

Valuable Features

Contrast Security Assess offers real-time vulnerability detection with minimal false positives, enhancing security through CI/CD integration and proactive measures.
Semgrep excels in multilingual secret detection, easy rule creation, and automated vulnerability identification, enhancing security and development efficiency.
The ability to see what is going on and what has been going on in a given application and basically get to see what is coming across it in real time is helpful in finding vulnerabilities to remediate before production deployments.
Threat & Vulnerability Management Senior Analyst at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Instead of fixing each vulnerability reported independently, you can group them and fix them in a single point in the source code, resolving several vulnerabilities at once.
Management Of Quality Managers at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Contrast Security Assess has positively impacted my organization by improving the security features of our application.
Postdoctoral Research Fellow at a program development consultancy with 1-10 employees
When you triage with AI, it gathers context around the finding and reduces the noise about 80 to 90 percent of the time, asking you to focus only on findings that really matter.
Cloud & Application Security at Sixt SE
The Software Composition Analysis is the most valuable feature in Semgrep.
DevSecOps Security Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
The best feature of Semgrep is its ability to highlight high priority issues during scanning, making it critical for developers to address these vulnerabilities promptly.
DevOps Engineer at Exponential Craft
 

Categories and Ranking

Contrast Security Assess
Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
12th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Application Security Tools (25th)
Semgrep
Ranking in Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
10th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Supply Chain Management Software (4th), Software Composition Analysis (SCA) (9th), Static Code Analysis (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Static Application Security Testing (SAST) category, the mindshare of Contrast Security Assess is 1.4%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Semgrep is 2.3%, down from 3.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Semgrep2.3%
Contrast Security Assess1.4%
Other96.3%
Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
 

Featured Reviews

Ryan Flake - PeerSpot reviewer
Threat & Vulnerability Management Senior Analyst at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Real-time assessments have improved remediation speed and reduced time spent on authentication issues
I do find that here and there with Contrast Security Assess there are user interface issues, particularly with how they work with libraries. The way that it works is people have access to library data for all applications, not just the applications that they should have access to. However, they are trying to fix that. The way the libraries are handled with Contrast Security Assess could use some work. I know that there is an additional service tier that allows for more in-depth library data. These are small things. Contrast support has been great in fixing any issues or getting back to us with questions. They seem to really be dedicated to the product.
Manjunath Maneppagol - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud & Application Security at Sixt SE
Context-aware code analysis has reduced noise and now improves developer experience with actionable security findings
I have consistently observed that their scan time is an issue for mono repos. Sometimes with their AI-based scanning, when you triage that scan, the scan never completes or finishes(, which makes it difficult. Another consistent issue is that whenever you have a new repo to onboard to the platform, the tool ideally should detect the master branch by default. However, sometimes the tool fails to identify it and will never scan it unless manually somebody looks into it and fixes the issue. Although their support team is really good, this issue was present six or eight months ago during the POC and is still present now. If it is affecting multiple customers, it should be prioritized and fixed. I would say that their integration aspects could have been improved. I see a lot of different security solutions that provide flexibility to the security teams based on Jira project, team divisions, Slack, and all those can be very much easily customized. Semgrep needs to work on the enhancement of their notification capabilities. Currently, they are working on identifying business logic vulnerabilities or privilege escalation vulnerabilities by looking at the code, and they should continue to focus on and improve this effort. Regarding stability, whenever you have a mono-repo which is a very large repository, the scan never finishes or the scan never kicks in. At that time, you have to reach out to the support team and ask them to expand the resources in the back end to fix it. This is an issue I keep seeing often on that platform.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise7
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Contrast Security Assess?
I was not involved in the negotiation of pricing for Contrast Security Assess, but I am somewhat familiar with setup cost and licensing. Licensing costs are fairly high compared to other DAST and S...
What needs improvement with Contrast Security Assess?
I don't use Contrast Security Assess anymore, so I cannot comment on how it can be improved; I stopped using it four years ago, but at the time, I think the UI could be improved to be more friendly...
What advice do you have for others considering Contrast Security Assess?
I don't remember specific metrics regarding the outcomes we saw, but I can tell that the false positive rate was a third compared to a static analysis scanner; we used to have automation testing ex...
What needs improvement with Semgrep?
Regarding improvements for Semgrep, I have noticed that it occasionally provides false positive results, although it does not happen consistently. That is the only major improvement I can think of,...
What is your primary use case for Semgrep?
Semgrep serves as an open-source static application security testing tool for my organization. We work under a microservices model with multiple repositories, around eight in total. Whenever we mak...
What advice do you have for others considering Semgrep?
Although not directly in the development process, Semgrep has saved substantial time in the review process. For instance, when a developer raises a pull request, Semgrep automatically reviews it be...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Contrast Assess
Semgrep Code, Semgrep Supply Chain, Semgrep AppSec Platform
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Williams-Sonoma, Autodesk, HUAWEI, Chromeriver, RingCentral, Demandware.
Policygenius, Tide, Lyft, Thinkific, FloQast, Vanta, and Fareportal
Find out what your peers are saying about Contrast Security Assess vs. Semgrep and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
917,433 professionals have used our research since 2012.