AppScan (formerly Rational AppScan) is an application security testing solution acquired by HCL Technologies from IBM in late 2018. Appscan supports both dynamic (DAST) and static (SAST) application security testing.
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SonarQube
Score 8.6 out of 10
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SonarQube is a code quality and vulnerability solution for development teams that integrates with CI/CD pipelines to ensure the software you produce is secure, reliable, and maintainable.
In HCL AppScan automation maintain a reasonable pace of review and remediation of flaws for our apps. HCL AppScan is a cloud-based enterprise mobile application security testing solution for Android and iOS applications developed using Java, .Net or Objective-C. So it covers all our area and It consists of three components: AppScan Source Edition for developing and testing apps internally, AppScan Standard Edition for testing internally or externally, and AppScan Enterprise Edition for large enterprises who need to secure their entire mobile application portfolio across the organization with multiple device types.
SonarQube is excellent if you start using it at the beginning when developing a new system, in this situation you will be able to fix things before they become spread and expensive to correct. It’s a bit less suitable to use on existing code with bad design as it’s usually too expensive to fix everything and only allows you to ensure the situation doesn’t get worse.
AppScan works well in finding application vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting and all of the OWASP top 10.
Flexible reporting allows us to generate executive reports for application owners as well as separate technical reports for developers and system engineers.
Technical reports include remediation information and cross reference CVSS scores
Because it maintains data on all repeated assessments it helps us to do trending and metrics on compliance
Detecting bugs and vulnerabilities: SonarQube can identify a wide range of bugs and vulnerabilities in code, such as null pointer exceptions, SQL injection, and cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. It uses static analysis to analyze the code and identify potential issues, and it can also integrate with dynamic analysis tools to provide even more detailed analysis.
Measuring code quality: SonarQube can measure a wide range of code quality metrics, such as cyclomatic complexity, duplicated code, and code coverage. This can help teams understand the quality of their code and identify areas that need improvement.
Providing actionable insights: SonarQube provides detailed information about issues in the code, including the file and line number where the issue occurs and the severity of the issue. This makes it easy for developers to understand and address issues in the code.
Integrating with other tools: SonarQube can be integrated with a wide range of development tools and programming languages, such as Git, Maven, and Java. This allows teams to use SonarQube in their existing development workflow and take advantage of its powerful code analysis capabilities.
Managing technical debt: SonarQube provides metrics and insights on the technical debt on the codebase, enabling teams to better prioritize issues to improve the quality of the code.
Compliance with coding standards: SonarQube can check the code against industry standards like OWASP, CWE and more, making sure the code is compliant with security and coding standards.
Importing a new custom quality profile on SonarQube is a bit tricky, it can be made easier
Every second time when we want to rerun the server, we have to restart the whole system, otherwise, the server stops and closes automatically
When we generate a new report a second time and try to access the report, it shows details of the old report only and takes a lot of time to get updated with the details of the new and fresh report generated
We we easily able to integrate the SonarQube steps into our TFS process via the Microsoft Marektplace, we didn't have the need to call SonarQube support. We've used their online documentation and community forum if we ran into any issues.
Both solutions are decent, however, I had team members who had the experience working with HCL AppScan. Also, the product was priced nominally which suited our budget. Further, HCL AppScan's user community was bigger and many learning resources were freely available which helped junior peers learn quickly and eliminate any issues
SonarQube is an open-source. It's a scalable product. The costs for this application, for the kind of job it does, are pretty descent. Pipeline scan is more secured in SonarQube. Its a very good tool and its support multiple languages. Its main core competency is of static code analysis and that is why SonarQube exists and it does it exceedingly well. The quality of scan on code convention, best practices, coding standards, unit test coverage etc makes them one of the best competent tool in the market
There are countless implementations to accomplish the same thing, and so many configurations are required.
Even if you test it finished and find no vulnerabilities, there is no point if you just get the error screen.
Until now, I was worried about vulnerabilities and security in software development, but I think it was good to find the vulnerability problem quickly with HCL AppScan.
Positive ROI from the standpoint of flagging several issues that would have otherwise likely been unaddressed and caused more time to be spent closer to launch
Slightly positive ROI from time-saving perspective (it's an automated check which is nice, but depending on the issues it finds, can take developers time to investigate and resolve)
