Top 8 Checkmarx Alternatives: Key Features & Pricing Analyzed

Checkmarx is an application security testing (AST) solution that includes a range of tools and services within its Checkmarx One platform for identifying, analyzing, and mitigating security vulnerabilities.

However, organizations may consider alternatives to Checkmarx for various reasons such as cost, usability, performance, or specialized requirements. Upon analyzing user reviews across multiple B2B review platforms, we observed that there are drawbacks to Checkmarx’s offerings. The right option varies based on the specific Checkmarx product in question. Refer to the appropriate sections for more details:

1. Checkmarx Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST)
2. Entire Checkmarx Application Security Testing

Top Checkmarx Alternatives – DAST

Table 1: Checkmarx alternatives comparison on dynamic application security testing

Vendors are listed in alphabetical order, except for the products of the sponsors of the article, which include links to the sponsors’ websites.

Table notes:

• Available*: Specific details about the duration of the trial are not explicitly mentioned.

Top Checkmarx Alternatives – Application Security Testing

Table 2: Checkmarx alternatives comparison on application security testing

Checkmarx One overview

Checkmarx’s suite of solutions is centered around its cloud-native platform, Checkmarx One, designed to embed security throughout all stages of the software development lifecycle (SDLC). This integrated Application Security Testing (AST) platform includes Static Application Security Testing (SAST), Software Composition Analysis (SCA), API security, and Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST), providing comprehensive security coverage for various aspects of software development.

Overview for each scanner available within the Checkmarx One platform:

• SAST: Checkmarx’s Static Application Security Testing scans at the source code level by integrating with Source Code Management (SCM) systems and Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) tools.
• SCA: Software composition analysis enables security and risk teams to identify and monitor open-source components used in applications, providing insights into associated risks.
• SCS: Software supply chain security automates the security operations of software supply chain, detects vulnerabilities and malicious code in open source and third-party software.
• IaC security: Checkmarx’s Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Security identifies vulnerabilities and configuration errors in IaC templates and streamlines the process by automating the creation of tickets.
• DAST: Dynamic application security testing (DAST) scans web applications and APIs for vulnerabilities and security weaknesses by testing endpoints and APIs in live environments, including REST, SOAP, and gRPC APIs. This approach integrates both static application security testing (SAST) and DAST capabilities to provide a comprehensive security assessment.

Reasons to look for alternatives to Checkmarx

1. Pricing: Checkmarx’s solutions are often described as costly, particularly for small businesses or individual developers. Organizations operating on limited budgets may seek more affordable alternatives.
2. False positives and false negatives: Some users report that the tool produces false positives and negatives. The need to manually check and confirm these findings can be a disadvantage for security teams.

1. Invicti

Invicti, formerly known as Netsparker, is an application security testing platform. The provider offers two main plans: standard and enterprise. The standard plan, designed for individual use, serves as a desktop web vulnerability scanner and is well-suited for professionals like security engineers, penetration testers, and developers who manage scans for fewer than 50 websites.

In contrast, the enterprise plan is tailored for multiple users and offers a thorough vulnerability assessment. This plan operates on a browser-based cloud platform, which eliminates the need for physical hardware or software, including purchases, licenses, installations, or ongoing maintenance.

Invicti’s web application security testing features proof-based vulnerability scanning, which verifies vulnerabilities by exploiting them in a read-only setting. This approach helps to reduce the rate of false positives and false negatives. Because of this capability, Invicti could be a strong alternative for organizations that are concerned about the high rate of false positives associated with Checkmarx.

2. Astra Security

Astra Pentest specializes in vulnerability scanning, particularly aimed at penetration testing and vulnerability assessments for web applications, APIs, and cloud environments. The service supports multiple platforms such as GitLab, Jenkins, Bitbucket, Azure, and CircleCI.

Astra Pentest provides three scanning modes: automated scan, vetted automated scan, and manual pentest. The manual pentest mode integrates automated scanning with vetted results and a comprehensive manual penetration test conducted by security professionals.

3. Intruder

Intruder offers a scanning solution that detects more than 75 web-layer security risks, including SQL injection and cross-site scripting, along with infrastructure security vulnerabilities such as remote code execution flaws and security misconfigurations like weak encryption settings.

Intruder’s web scanner is capable of scanning single page applications (SPAs), effectively navigating and interacting with complex client-side scripts. It can also assess the number of active systems requiring a scanning license.

4. Snyk

Snyk is a security platform aimed at developers that identifies security vulnerabilities in proprietary code, open source dependencies, container images, and cloud infrastructure. Snyk allows for both manual and automatic code scanning. The platform is composed of four main products:

• Snyk Code and Snyk Open Source: Designed to protect your code and the third-party open source code packages it depends on.
• Snyk Container: Extend your supply chain security, enabling you to choose the most secure foundations for building container images and to address vulnerabilities in Linux and applications.
• Snyk Infrastructure as Code (Snyk IaC): Offers a unified policy engine to safeguard your cloud configurations.

5. Cycode

Cycode is a security platform that scans the entire software development life cycle (SDLC). It focuses on Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Security and Source Code Leakage Detection. The platform’s offerings include:

• Application Security Posture Management (ASPM): Detects application security vulnerabilities and secures software configurations from development process to deployment.
• Software Composition Analysis (SCA): Identifies vulnerabilities in software components.
• Static Application Security Testing (SAST): Analyzes source code for security flaws without executing programs.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Security: Prevents misconfigurations in cloud environments and ensures compliance with security standards.

6. Fortify

Fortify by OpenText is an application security solution that provides an array of tools for safeguarding applications. These tools include static code analysis (SAST), dynamic analysis (DAST), and software composition analysis (SCA).

• Static code analyzer (SCA): Detects security vulnerabilities within the source code.
• WebInspect (DAST): Fortify WebInspect offers functionalities such as automated macro creation, macro validation, and validation of fixes. It is compatible with any Selenium script and accommodates Swagger and OData formats through the WISwag command line tool.
• Software composition analysis (SCA): Creates software bills of materials (SBOMs) and determines related licenses within the DevOps pipeline.

7. Synopsys

Synopsys is a DevSecOps-optimized application security platform that provides a range of solutions including supply chain security, static analysis (SAST), software composition analysis (SCA), interactive analysis (IAST), and dynamic analysis (DAST). Here are some services of Synopsys’ application security offerings:

• Static Analysis (SAST): Known as Coverity, this tool allows users to detect vulnerabilities within the source code by checking for security flaws and quality issues.
• Software Composition Analysis (SCA): This analysis concentrates on identifying open-source components, managing open-source licenses, and detecting security vulnerabilities in third-party components.
• Dynamic Analysis (DAST): Known as WhiteHat Dynamic, it conducts simulated attacks on active applications to identify vulnerabilities and integrates security testing into CI/CD pipelines.
• Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST): This method merges aspects of SAST and DAST, enabling security and development teams to monitor applications internally as they operate in testing or production settings.

8. Veracode

Veracode offers a range of products designed to detect security issues in application code. Here’s a summary of their security services:

• Static Analysis: This service analyzes major programming frameworks and languages and does not require access to the source code for its analysis.
• Software Composition Analysis: This tool compiles an inventory of the libraries used in an application and identifies known vulnerabilities in each of those libraries.
• Dynamic Analysis: Suitable for both web applications and REST APIs, this analysis involves crawling web application URLs or API endpoints. Veracode Dynamic Analysis interacts with various elements of the target web application or API, such as links, text, and forms

Further reading

• Top 7 Alternatives To Burp Suite For Application Security Testing
• 8 Best Rapid7 Alternatives Based on 1400+ Reviews

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