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Checkmarx excels at finding and remediating risks across the entire application footprint. Though the platform offers some good products and services, it does have some limitations (e.g., it needs more code quality features) and is substantially more expensive than some of its alternatives.
If you’re a Checkmarx user or part of a team seeking a more robust solution for code quality and security management, here’s our list of the top five Checkmarx alternatives for 2024.
What Checkmarx Does
Checkmarx is an enterprise application security company specializing in static application security testing (SAST). One of its products is Checkmarx One, a cloud-native application security testing (AST) platform.
The platform offers these key features:
1. Comprehensive security coverage: Checkmarx One offers a wide array of security tools to secure various application components, such as source code (SAST, API security, and DAST), software supply chain (SCA, SBOOM, and SSCS), and cloud containers (Container and IaC).
2. Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST): Checkmarx One identifies security issues such as misconfigurations and software defects in running applications. It can be used by a human tester, an automated test, or any activity that interacts with the application's functionality.
3. Seamless developer experience: It integrates with all major Git providers, CI/CD, and bug ticketing systems. It also offers IDE extensions for Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ IDEA, enabling developers to catch and resolve issues in real time without leaving their IDE window.
4. Malicious package protection: Checkmarx automatically scans open-source code for malicious packages using its automated scanning technology and vast database of malicious packages. It alerts developers of any compromised dependency and offers immediate remediation.
Beyond these, Checkmarx One offers AI-assisted tools, codebashing, a detailed resource center, and compliance standards like OWASP Top 10, PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, and NIST. It also supports over 100 programming languages, frameworks, and SDLC integrations.
When evaluating alternatives to Checkmarx, consider the following factors:
- Scanning capabilities: Only consider tools that offer the type of security protection your project requires. We recommend a tool that provides static and dynamic application security testing features to ensure comprehensive coverage of potential vulnerabilities.
- Workflow integrations: Before picking a tool, check if it’s compatible with your current development and deployment processes, including CI/CD pipelines, source control systems, IDEs, and container registries. Smooth integration can greatly improve the efficiency of your security workflow.
- Speed and performance: Look for solutions that provide quick analysis and use resources efficiently, as this improves developer productivity. Also, check how accurately the tool identifies real vulnerabilities versus false positives, as this impacts remediation efforts.
- Cost: Analyze the pricing structure, including licensing fees and any additional costs for features or support, to ensure it fits within your budget.
What Checkmarx Misses
So, why might one look beyond Checkmarx for their code security needs? These are some of the main issues and limitations associated with Checkmarx:
- It doesn’t do code quality: Although Checkmarx One offers many tools for enforcing security practices, it does not perform code quality analysis. Teams looking for code quality must complement it with a separate code quality solution, potentially complicating the code review process.
- High false positives: Checkmarx reports a false positive rate of less than 5%; however, several reviews indicate many false positives.
- Too expensive: Checkmarx is one of the more expensive application security testing (AST) services. It’s also worth noting that the price increases with licenses and the number of users you onboard.
Let’s look at some worthy alternatives you should explore in 2024.
Codacy
Codacy offers an integrated platform and a range of services catering to the security of enterprise applications and codebases. It delivers full-spectrum security and code quality at all stages of the software development lifecycle while streamlining the code review process via workflow integrations, automated code checks, and other features.
Key features:
1. Comprehensive code analysis: Codacy offers code quality analysis (Codacy Quality) and security analysis (Codacy Security) to prevent various vulnerabilities in code, including issues from OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities, code smells, code duplication, and maintainability. It supports over 40 programming languages and frameworks for diverse development teams.
2. Security-focused approach: Codacy's wide array of tools offers protection against sundry threats and helps mitigate risks. It offers SAST and SCA to keep your code clean and secure, secret detection to secure sensitive information, IaC Security to detect cloud misconfigurations, DAST to find vulnerabilities by simulating attacks via the front end, and penetration testing to find vulnerabilities via simulated cyberattacks.
3. Developer-first experience: The platform integrates with GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket, making it easy to work on projects across multiple platforms. It boasts intuitive risk management dashboards, a CLI tool, a comprehensive resource center, and IDE extensions that enable you to integrate Codacy's code analysis capabilities into Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ IDEA.
4. AI-assisted code fixes: Codacy uses artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline code remediation, which saves precious time and creates a more seamless development experience. For example, Codacy’s SAST tool uses AI to secure your AI-generated code by suggesting fixes and improvements directly in your IDE and Git workflow.
5. Automated code reviews: After you import a repository, Codacy automatically scans it for issues using a set of customizable coding standards, best practices, and quality gates. It also analyzes your pull requests and prevents problematic code from merging into the main branch (if you enable status checks and branch protection)
You might also want data-driven insights (Codacy Pulse) to improve your team’s engineering performance and code coverage in over 40 programming languages (code coverage measures how much code is being tested). Codacy shows coverage metrics on every pull request, allowing teams to track and improve test coverage over time.
The Security and Risk Management overview page offers a high-level view of your organization's security posture. It includes the number of open findings, their severity distribution, a history of resolution, and a breakdown of the highest-risk repositories and most common security categories.
Codacy logs important events in your organization, indicating when your team members execute specific operations. Organization admins and managers can obtain the audit log data of the organization events using the Codacy API (the audit logs feature is only available on the Business plan).
Why Choose Codacy Over Checkmarx
In terms of comprehensiveness, Codacy comes out on top. The platform consolidates all modern security, quality, and analytics tools in one place: SAST, SCA, hardcoded secrets detection, code coverage, IaC security, DAST, penetrative testing, and Cloud Posture Management (CSPM)—coming soon.
Checkmarx is not as comprehensive as Codacy, but it performs at a high code quality level. Teams looking for code quality must complement it with a separate code quality solution, potentially complicating the code review process.
In addition, Checkmarx is substantially more expensive and has a steeper learning curve for smaller teams. Codacy is more affordable and accessible; it allows you to start analyzing code immediately with minimal configuration.
Snyk
Snyk presents a robust alternative to Checkmarx, tailored to teams that want a dedicated code security platform rather than a complete application security platform. It does a good job of finding risks in the various application components and eliminating them.
1. Wide security coverage: Snyk identifies and resolves vulnerabilities in source code (Snyk Code), open-source dependencies (Snyk Open-Source), container images (Snyk Container), and infrastructure as code configurations (Snyk Infrastructure as Code)
2. Developer-first design: Though some users have complained about Snyk’s user interface, the tool offers developer-friendly features such as dozens of integrations (container registries, IDEs, Git, runtimes, CI/CD, etc.), flexible controls, a CLI tool, a detailed API, comprehensive user documentation and a Web UI.
3. AI-assisted coding: Snyk’s hybrid AI engine leverages machine learning to provide one-click security fixes and code remediation in human-written and AI-generated code. Developers can easily review suggested fixes directly within their IDE and adjust as needed, enabling them to build quickly while maintaining security.
4. Compliance controls: Snyk helps you meet requirements for regulatory compliance, open-source license compliance, and cloud compliance. It supports controls for security training, SBOMs, scanning, vulnerability reporting, limiting access, and configuration standards.
5. Dedicated vulnerability database: The Snyk Vulnerability Database contains a comprehensive list of known security vulnerabilities and is updated by its dedicated research team using security intelligence.
Beyond these, Snyk offers on-demand training sessions, a code checker, API, third-party marketplaces, a detailed documentation/resource center, and a Web UI that provides centralized monitoring, allowing teams to implement governance and compliance with dashboards, policies, and reports.
Snyk’s OSS advisor tool helps developers search for the best package for their projects. It scans and compares over 1 million open-source packages registered in Snyk’s database.
Why Choose Snyk Over Checkmarx
Snyk provides superior AI-assisted coding capabilities than Checkmarx. It integrates seamlessly with generative AI tools to provide automatic inline fix suggestions that prevent insecure code from entering your codebase. Checkmarx SAST lacks real-time IDE scanning, forcing developers to revisit their code to address human and AI-generated security issues.
Secondly, Snyk scans code faster than Checkmarx and averages speeds 2.4x faster than similar solutions. Checkmarx, on the other hand, requires heavy customization by security experts to reduce false positives.
DeepSource
DeepSource is another solid Checkmarx alternative for teams looking for reliable static code analysis. Though not a comprehensive solution like Codacy, it offers static code analysis in multiple languages, auto-remediation technology, and other tools to make the codebase cleaner and more stable.
Key features:
1. Comprehensive security tools: DeepSource offers static analysis, infrastructure as code (IaC) analysis, SAST, secret scanning, and code coverage, supporting all major programming languages (including JavaScript, Python, PHP, Ruby, and Java).
2. Workflow integrations: The platform can be integrated with GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps Services, and Google Source Repositories. It also provides a Visual Studio Code extension that enables developers to catch and resolve over 3000 security issues as they write code without leaving their IDE window.
3. Low false positive rate: DeepSource’s SAST tool provides stable results. The company reports an impressive 5% false positive rate, which would make it more accurate than many alternative SAST tools.
4. AI-assisted code fixes: DeepSource’s Autofix engine scans several project files at once and creates pull requests with the recommended changes, saving users the hassle of manually addressing these issues.
Additionally, DeepSource performs static analysis and generates coverage reports for every commit, allowing users to address issues and track code coverage levels. It also offers a centralized dashboard that enables teams to visualize key metrics, monitor code health trends, and identify improvement areas.
It runs code formatters like Black, Prettier, go fmt, isort, and autopep8 automatically on every commit to format your code, allowing you to enforce coding standards without lifting a finger.
Why Choose DeepSource Over Checkmarx
While Checkmarx users frequently report that the results are noisy and include many false positives, DeepSource ensures that less than 5% of the issues reported are false positives. It also allows users to suppress these false positives and report them to DeepSource support.
It’s important to note that Checkmarx and DeepSource aren’t complete tools for holistic application security. DeepSource doesn’t do software composition analysis (SCA), and Checkmarx doesn’t offer code quality analysis. Customers looking for comprehensive security must complement them with an additional tool or opt for an integrated solution like Codacy.
Veracode
Veracode is an application security platform designed to help software teams build and scale secure software from code to cloud. It offers designed-for-developer tools, API and workflow integrations, and auto-remediation technology developers need to write and ship secure code.
Key features:
1. Wide array of security tools: Veracode offers SAST, SCA, DAST, PTaaS (Penetration Testing), Container Security, and Longbow, making it a noteworthy option for enterprises that want comprehensive security coverage.
2. Workflow integrations: The platform has over 40 integrations into IDEs, CI/CD tools, SCM tools, and cloud providers. Users can install Veracode’s unified SCA and SAST Visual Studio Code plugin to catch and resolve security vulnerabilities without leaving their IDE window (it supports over 100 languages and frameworks).
3. Cloud-native architecture: Veracode leverages the advantages of the cloud with automated application analysis in the pipeline and on-demand expertise. Its built-in autoscaling feature removes uncertainty, enabling teams to scale effortlessly as their business expands.
4) AI-assisted flaw remediation: When you install Veracode to your IDE, it comes with the Veracode Fix feature, which provides AI-generated fixes and real-time flaw remediation. The feature is also available as a command-line tool.
In addition, you get OSWAP 10 Security, an intuitive user dashboard, support for different application types, and a dedicated e-learning platform. Its analysis center gives product owners a birds-eye view of code health.
With Veracode’s policy management and reporting, security teams can set clear goals for software security, get progress reports, and guide development teams on what to fix.
Why Choose Veracode Over Checkmarx
Veracode and Checkmarx offer many security features, but neither is a complete application security platform. Both tools do not perform code quality analysis (Checkmarx doesn’t provide code coverage in addition to code quality), requiring users to complement them with additional tools.
It is worth noting that while Veracode offers an IDE plugin for performing SAST and SCA scans, Checkmarx has a faster code remediation time, allowing developers to fix once and remediate throughout.
GitGuardian
GitGuardian is a developer-focused solution that monitors real-time GitHub activity for exposed API secret tokens, database credentials, and certificates, ensuring your repositories are protected through continuous oversight. In addition, the platform offers additional tools to maintain the cleanliness and security of your application code.
Key Features:
1. Real-time monitoring: GitGuardian continuously scans GitHub repositories and the entire software supply chain for sensitive data such as API keys, database credentials, and certificates. With the ggshield command-line tool, developers detect and fix 450+ hardcoded secrets in a unified experience, ensuring comprehensive secrets detection before code deployment.
2. Software composition analysis: Beyond detection, GitGuardian secures your software supply chain by prioritizing open-source or third-party risks and managing SBOMs.
3. Automated alerts: When GitGuardian finds exposed sensitive information, it quickly alerts the development team. This helps them fix problems right away, lowering the risk of unauthorized access.
4. Integrations: GitGuardian offers integrations for dozens of version control systems and CI/CD platforms, including GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, Jenkins CI, and Azure Pipelines. It also provides integrations for several Git hooks (scripts that are triggered by certain actions in the software development process, like committing or pushing)
5. Detailed reporting: The platform provides comprehensive reports that include information about detected secrets, the files they were found in, and guidance on how to remediate the issues. This helps teams understand and mitigate risks effectively.
GitGuardian’s unified incident management platform enables software teams to centralize incidents across source control and productivity tools for a holistic view, facilitating swift remediation across monitored assets.
Integrating with the dashboard, GitGuardian’s CLI tool (ggshield) maintains a comprehensive incident history and learns from it to prevent alert fatigue. Users can customize monitoring settings and collaborate with teammates via the dashboard.
Why Choose GitGuardian Over Checkmarx
Checkmarx offers a broad range of security solutions, including static and dynamic application security testing, code vulnerability assessment, and compliance, making it ideal for comprehensive application security coverage.
In contrast, GitGuardian specializes in detecting sensitive information like API keys and passwords in code repositories, providing effective alerts for any accidental exposure. If your focus is solely on managing secrets, GitGuardian is a strong choice.
Choose The Right Option For Your Team
Codacy is the best solution for your application security needs. It provides the most comprehensive set of DevSecOps tools—covering security, quality, and test coverage—at a lower cost than other alternatives. Plus, it’s user-friendly and easily integrates into any development workflow.
In the end, the choice is entirely yours. This article seeks to showcase the strengths and weaknesses of each tool. The right tool for your team will be the one that best fits your unique requirements and enhances your development workflow.
Ready to experience Codacy's benefits for yourself? Start your free trial today and see how Codacy can transform your code quality and security practices.
