Founded in 2006, Veracode is one of the oldest application security platforms in the industry. But like most other platforms, it has its fair share of flaws and limitations, which has prompted many customers (and perhaps you, too) to seek more suitable alternatives for your development team.
If you’re a Veracode user or part of a team considering an upgrade from Veracode, here are the top five Veracode alternatives to consider in 2024.
What Veracode Does
Every tool has strengths and weaknesses. Our goal is to show you the pros and cons of each tool, leaving you to decide which one best suits your needs.
Veracode is an application security platform that offers these key features:
1. Comprehensive security coverage: Veracode offers holistic security coverage with SAST, SCA, DAST, PTaaS (Penetrative Testing), Container Security, and Longbow. This makes it a solid option for enterprises seeking a unified security platform to build and secure their software from code to the cloud.
2. Frictionless Developer Experience: Veracode brings security to developers with over 40 integrations into IDEs, CI/CD tools, SCM tools, and cloud providers. It offers a unified SCA and SAST Visual Studio Code plugin that scans your projects in real-time for security weaknesses (and supports over 100 languages and frameworks).
3. Comprehensive vulnerability database: Veracode has a dedicated vulnerability database that covers vulnerabilities in various programming languages, frameworks, operating systems, versions, and licenses.
4. AI-assisted flaw remediation: Veracode Fix secures your code in seconds with AI-generated fixes and real-time flaw remediation. This feature is available alongside their scanning technology in a growing number of IDEs, and is also available as a command line tool,
5. Accurate analysis and low false positives: Veracode guarantees a false-positive rate of less than 1.1%, better than the industry average.
In addition to these benefits, Veracode offers multi-language support, e-learning platforms, intuitive user dashboards, and Next Best Actions (to identify today's optimal actions and reduce the most cloud risks). When evaluating alternatives to Veracode, consider the following factors:
- Comprehensive security coverage: Assess whether the alternative offers robust and wide-ranging security testing capabilities, including static and dynamic analysis and support for multiple programming languages and frameworks.
- Integration and workflow compatibility: Evaluate how well the tool integrates with your existing development and CI/CD workflows. Seamless integration can significantly enhance productivity and ensure that security testing becomes a natural part of your development process.
- Scalability and performance: Consider the tool’s ability to scale with your organization’s needs and its performance impact on your development environment. It should handle growing codebases and increasing security demands efficiently without slowing development.
- Cost and licensing: Review the pricing structure and licensing options to ensure they align with your budget and provide good value for the features offered. Some tools may offer more flexible or cost-effective plans based on your specific requirements.
What Veracode Misses
What are some reasons you might explore alternatives to Veracode? Here are a few frequently-noted limitations and challenges linked to Veracode:
- Unreliable DAST product: Some engineers have complained about Veracode’s dynamic testing feature, claiming it to be inefficient and expensive.
- The on-premise testing experience is not the best: Veracode’s on-premise application test experience is not always as good as the web application test experience, and the platform lacks some important report customization features.
- Occasional delays in updating the vulnerability database: In some cases, it takes a while for vulnerabilities to appear in Veracode’s database. This might result in a delay in identifying and addressing security issues, leaving your applications exposed to risks.
- Expiration for risk acceptance: Speaking of customization, Veracode doesn’t allow you to set an expiration date while marking a vulnerability as risk accepted (risk acceptance is set indefinitely at the moment). This requires manual tracking, which can be cumbersome.
Now that you know Veracode's good and bad sides, what alternatives should you consider? Let’s take a look.
1. Codacy
Codacy tops the list of Veracode alternatives, offering a comprehensive and developer-friendly alternative to Veracode. It provides a curated collection of best-in-class code analysis, security, coverage, and engineering performance tools.
Key features:
- Integrated AppSec platform: Codacy’s extensive quality and security tools offer maximum application security throughout the SDLC. The platform equips developers with quality, security, coverage, and analytics tools to help teams achieve the highest security standards without complicating their workflow.
- Developer-first design: Codacy adapts seamlessly to your code review process with integrations for popular Git providers like GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket, ticketing platforms like Jira and Slack, and open-source code analysis tools like SemGrep, Trivy, and SonarC#. It also provides a CLI tool for local scans, IDE plugins for real-time feedback during development, and intuitive user dashboards.
- Security-focused approach: The platform gives developers a unified set of security tools to mitigate risk from all angles, including SAST, SCA, hard-coded secret detection, infrastructure-as-code configs (IaC), DAST, and penetration testing. It offers a 360-degree view of application security.
- AI-assisted code fixes: Codacy’s Quality AI uses artificial intelligence to suggest fixes and improvements in your source code in your IDE and Git provider. This automated software correction feature streamlines the software development process, enhancing your team’s developer productivity.
Codacy comes with pre-configured coding standards and rulesets based on best practices, making it easier for developers to use the tool without doing much configuration. Its UI dashboards offer insights into your code’s health and configuration options, like quality gates, security rules, integrations, and other settings.
Codacy automates code reviews, and monitors code quality on every commit and pull request in over 40 programming languages. It provides detailed reports on issues found, such as issues concerning code style, best practices, and security.
New features are coming. The dev team recently introduced penetration testing services for business-tier customers, while Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) is coming soon.
Why Choose Codacy Over Veracode
While both offer a wide array of code quality and security features, Codacy is easier to set up and use due to the pre-configurations. It also has a more intuitive user interface and great customer support.
Codacy allows teams to set custom quality and code style thresholds, ensuring the code analysis process is tailored to meet the project's specific requirements. Veracode, on the other hand, offers limited customization options compared to other on-premises solutions.
Codacy's emphasis on code quality metrics and its ability to detect issues early in development makes it a valuable tool for improving code standards and reducing technical debt.
2. Snyk
Unlike Codacy, which offers a more comprehensive alternative to Veracode, Snyk specializes more in security. Snyk can take care of an organization's code security needs by itself. However, teams looking to transition from Veracode must pair it entirely with a separate code quality solution.
Key features:
1. Comprehensive security coverage: Snyk offers four key products to take care of your application security needs:
- Snyk Code secures your code as it’s written
- Snyk Open Source helps you avoid vulnerable dependencies
- Snyk Container helps keep your base images secure
- Snyk Infrastructure as Code helps fix IaC misconfigurations in-code
2. Developer-first design: Snyk integrates with dozens of tools, including popular IDEs, SCM tools, CI/CD tools, cloud platforms, and notification and ticketing systems. Snyk weaves security expertise into your IDE, repositories, and workflows through these integrations.
- Dedicated vulnerability database: Snyk’s vulnerability database contains a registry of open-source vulnerabilities and cloud misconfigurations. The database is maintained by Snyk’s dedicated research team using industry-leading security intelligence.
- AI-assisted coding: DeepCode AI powers Snyk's one-click security fixes and comprehensive app coverage, allowing developers to build fast while staying secure. Developers can quickly review the suggested fix—provided in line with their code right from the IDE— and adjust if needed.
Beyond these, Snyk supports over 30 languages and provides a rich set of APIs for third-party integration. Users can interact with the Snyk platform programmatically via the API or visually via its Web UI, enabling admins to access reports, issues, settings, help, dependencies, etc.
Snyk also provides context-driven prioritization of vulnerabilities, helping teams focus on the most critical issues first.
Why Choose Snyk Over Veracode
Snyk scans your code as it's being written, with average speeds that are 2.4 times faster than competitors. Veracode, however, requires you to fully compile your code before you can run security scans in the context of your whole application.
The next frontier is AI. Snyk’s Deepcode AI is a security-specific, hybrid AI and ML engine trained and updated by Snyk security researchers. However, Veracode relies on a GPT-based AI model to suggest code fixes.
Snyk also provides more IDE plugins (with full SAST scanning capabilities) and allows you to build one yourself. By contrast, Veracode Greenlight is limited to 4 IDEs and has limited support for small files and packages only.
3. SonarQube
SonarSource offers an application security platform and a good Veracode alternative called SonarQube. It’s an on-premise, web-based code analysis tool that combines static and dynamic analysis tools in one solution, enabling teams to analyze and measure source code quality continually.
Key features:
1) Powerful static code analyzer: SonarQube detects and eliminates bugs, vulnerabilities, and code smells in over thirty languages, including Java, Python, Go, JavaScript, TypeScript, C, C++, and C#. SonarCloud is the cloud version of SonarSource’s static code analysis product.
2) Easy integration with popular tools: SonarQube supports integration with multiple Git providers and CI/CD platforms, allowing you to maintain code quality and security in your projects. It provides a free IDE extension and other integrations that enable you to sanitize code in real time within your IDE and CI/CD workflow, allowing you to follow the “clean as you code” methodology.
3) AI-assisted coding: SonarQube’s SonarLint IDE plugin leverages machine learning models to detect code smells, bugs, and security vulnerabilities in your IDE as you code. Its AI-driven recommendations and code generation capabilities guide developers toward best practices, enhancing code quality and reducing technical debt.
4) Secrets detection: SonarQube includes a powerful secret detection tool to prevent secrets from leaking out and becoming a serious security breach.
Beyond these, you might also want multi-language support, issue tracking, dashboards, CI/CD integrations, and rule sets. It provides a centralized dashboard where you can view the percentage of your codebase exercised by your tests for valuable insights into your code's health.
SonarQube comes in different editions: community (free and open-source), developer (best for developers), enterprise (for managing security at the enterprise level), and data center (offers high availability for global deployments).
For code analysis, you can connect SonarQube to a local working copy of a codebase or a DevOps platform like GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, or Azure DevOps and specify a project in the repository to analyze.
Why Choose SonarQube Over Veracode
The answer to which tool to choose depends on what you want out of the tool. Veracode specializes in identifying security vulnerabilities, while SonarQube is best suited for assessing overall code quality. Each of these tools has different specialties.
Although SonarQube includes some static rules that can detect certain vulnerabilities, its coverage is limited compared to Veracode, which provides a more comprehensive analysis of security issues.
4. DeepSource
DeepSource is another solid Veracode alternative for teams seeking a robust application security platform to keep their codebase secure. It addresses code quality and security concerns and is designed to integrate easily into existing workflows.
Key features:
1) Comprehensive security tools: DeepSource offers static analysis, IaC analysis, SAST, secret scanning, and code coverage. Its SAST engine powers over 16 static analyzers and supports all major programming languages. These analyzers run on every commit and help you address code quality and security issues pre-merge.
2) Developer-friendly experience: The platform integrates with popular DevOps platforms such as GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, Azure DevOps Services, and Google source Repositories. It offers intuitive user dashboards and a Visual Studio Code plugin that finds and fixes over 3000+ code maintainability and security issues without leaving the IDE.
3) Low false positive rate: DeepSource’s false positive rate is less than 5%, lower than most competitors. Its robust analysis post-processing framework is designed to filter out only the most relevant issues and leave the noise behind.
4) AI-assisted code fixes: DeepSource’s AI-powered plugin detects coding issues in real-time and automatically fixes them. You can accept or reject suggestions with a click.
DeepSource offers first-class coverage of industry standards like OWASP Top 10, SANS Top 25, and major Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) issues. It provides a centralized dashboard to help users visualize key metrics, uncover code health trends, and identify improvement areas.
Users can create sophisticated gating rules based on issue categories and priorities and configure their VCS provider to block pull requests if any rules are violated. In addition, you can run popular code formatters like Black, Prettier, go fmt, isort, and autopep8 automatically on every commit. Deep Source will apply the changes without you lifting a finger (on a button).
Why Choose DeepSource Over Veracode
DeepSource’s free plan allows you to scan unlimited public and private repositories, which is fantastic for open-source projects, individuals, and small teams. Veracode also offers a free community edition, but this version has many limitations.
Both tools offer great SAST tools with a low false-positive rate. While DeepSource might offer slightly better SAST coverage, Veracode might be a better option for teams looking for a more holistic solution that addresses various aspects of application security, including vulnerability management and infrastructure protection.
5. Checkmarx
Checkmarx’s cloud-native application security platform, Checkmarx One, is a robust Veracode alternative for teams seeking a unified code security solution. It provides a complete set of enterprise AppSec solutions for businesses to secure their applications from initial code development to cloud deployment.
Key features:
1) Comprehensive security coverage: The Checkmarx One platform offers vast security features bordering on code security (SAST, API security, and DAST), supply chain security (SCA, SBOOM, and SSCS), and cloud security (Container and IaC). With these tools, enterprises can secure their application development process–from code to cloud–on a unified platform.
2) Seamless developer experience: Checkmarx One meets developers where they are, offering dozens of integrations for popular IDEs, SCM tools, bug ticketing systems, and CI/CD platforms. This allows developers to incorporate code security analysis into their workflows without needing to learn new tools.
3) AI Security: AI Security enables developers to use generative AI tools for code generation and remediation, helping to speed up development time and boost productivity. Checkmarx’s GitHub Copilot integration will allow you to do all that within your IDE.
4) Cloud insights: Checkmarx One Cloud Insights provides actionable solutions to address these challenges by correlating data throughout the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC) and runtime environments. By integrating with these runtime environments, developers can concentrate on the most critical issues that significantly impact their business.
In addition, Checkmarx One offers multi-language support, personalized security training (codebashing), a comprehensive documentation/ resource center, and a visual dashboard that shows the overall security status of your projects.
Checkmarx One also offers end-to-end API security, which helps protect every API in your source code.
Why Choose Checkmarx Over Veracode
With Checkmarx, a single event can trigger multiple scans. Veracode has separate plugins for SAST and SCA, which means different scans for SAST and SCA, making it less effective at detecting security issues in real time. The latter also uses APIs to connect to SCM tooling.
Checkmarx also has a faster code-to-remediation time than Veracode (which requires two builds, only scans compiled code, and struggles to point vulnerable code).
Choose The Right Option For Your Team
When keeping code secure and clean, the best option is usually the one that leaves no stone unturned when evaluating your code. While most platforms on this list offer a comprehensive set of code quality and security tools, Codacy comes out on top with better developer experience, vast toolchains, seamless integration into existing workflows, and more reliable vulnerability detection tools.
Each code security platform has its pros and cons. We did our best to highlight these to give you a holistic perspective. Ultimately, the best tool is the one that fits your team’s specific needs and enhances your development process.
Ready to give Codacy a try? Start your free trial today and see how Codacy can transform your code quality and security practices.
